By Ankit Panda, June 25, 2025
In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union represented nothing short of a geopolitical tragedy for North Korea. Kim Il Sung, the then-leader of North Korea, had lost not only an important patron, but an important counter-balance to China.
However, Russia’s renewed partnership with North Korea presents Pyongyang with its greatest geopolitical opportunity in more than three decades.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and illegal war against Ukraine has given Moscow ample reason to seek out North Korea’s assistance. Gone are the days of Russia’s post-Cold War foreign policy orientation toward North and South Korea premised on maintaining equidistance; instead, Putin has fully embraced Kim Il Sung’s grandson, Kim Jong Un, as a partner in war and as a comrade in Moscow’s broader struggle against the Western-led international system. As of May 2025, both countries have now openly publicized their co-operation to their own people.
While this strategic partnership and convergence is borne of shared interests and a common misgiving in both Moscow and Pyongyang about the nature of the international system and their place in it, it has also manifested a powerful set of quid pro quos for both countries. For Putin, North Korean materiel and personnel have helped reduce the burdens on Russia, allowing it to backfill its own munitions stocks while continuing to attrite Ukraine. Kim, meanwhile, has sought compensation for North Korea’s contributions to Russia’s war effort along several lines.
This said, North Korea’s grand strategy since the 1950s has been marked by a compulsive mistrust of major powers. So, even as Kim and Putin have come together in a moment of strategic convergence seeking mutual benefits, there will be limits to their alliance. For Pyongyang, Russia provides an important alternative to China, upon whom North Korea’s economy continues to remain largely dependent.
Russian technical assistance to North Korea could have significant consequences for the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. This is true even if Russia does not seek to deliberately co-operate with North Korea on strategic technologies, including nuclear weapons. Pyongyang can benefit from access to spare parts to render its largely obsolete air force more airworthy, and from raw and composite materials sourced from Russia to manufacture everything from warships to ballistic missiles.
Conventional modernization, for instance, can quickly transform many of the military planning assumptions that the United States and South Korea have been able to take for granted for years. South Korea’s national security director, Shin Won-sik, has publicly shared Seoul’s assessment that North Korea has likely received air defence systems. While integration of these systems will take time, it raises the prospect of North Korea, for the first time in decades, fielding a meaningful anti-air capability. Similarly, Russian assistance with anti-tank guided missiles, electronic warfare capabilities, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies could broadly render the Korean People’s Army more capable in limited conventional skirmishes, or even a full-scale conflict.
Of course, given the potential consequences, the matter of possible direct and indirect Russian assistance and support to North Korea’s nuclear weapons complex cannot be ignored. Policy-makers must remain vigilant to this possibility and imaginative regarding the possible ways in which such co-operation could manifest. Senior Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, have indicated that Moscow has closed the file on North Korea as a nonproliferation matter.
Article 10 of the “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty between Moscow and Pyongyang alludes to possible co-operation on “peaceful nuclear energy,” which could prove a useful fig leaf for meaningful technology transfer from Russia to North Korea in ways that could contribute to Kim Jong Un’s publicly stated goal of “exponentially” increasing his fissile material stockpiles (figuratively, if not literally). For instance, Russia is a world-leader in advanced gas centrifuges; any co-operation in this area could significantly increase the efficiency of North Korea’s gas centrifuge cascades and thus increase the availability of highly enriched uranium for weapons use.
Similar co-operative potential could exist in other areas. Russia could resume technical co-operation with North Korea at the long-mothballed IRT-2000 research reactor (which used to depend on Soviet HEU fuel supply for operation) or undertake joint experimentation with North Korean nuclear engineers on reprocessing and fuel fabrication techniques. Russian assistance could similarly prove instrumental as North Korea seeks to benefit from a new suspected light water reactor at Yongbyon that has been under construction for more than a decade and may now be operating.
Without doubt, the most impactful – and dangerous – form of co-operation would be on nuclear weapons design matters. Russia has decades of experience with what is arguably North Korea’s chief nuclear weapons development priority: developing compact nonstrategic nuclear warheads. North Korea could benefit substantially from assistance in this area. However, Russia does not have a clear self-interest in catalyzing North Korean vertical proliferation. Despite the shared interests driving their convergence, Russia is unlikely to deliver on all of North Korea’s technical demands and may instead choose to prioritize transfers in other areas, such as space, conventional weaponry, and perhaps fuel cycle technologies. China, meanwhile,, maintains a strong interest in limiting North Korea’s vertical proliferation efforts and may have privately communicated red lines to Moscow pertaining to potential co-operation in this area. In general terms, however, alliances can exist without open-ended, limitless technology sharing (as, for instance, has long been the case for the United States with its own allies).
Article 10 of the 2024 Russia-North Korea treaty, similarly, provides a legal basis for the two countries to co-operate on space technologies. This has been a concern since Kim travelled to the Russian Far East in September 2023 to meet Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast. The two leaders made no secret of their potential interest in co-operating on space matters and Kim was briefed next to a Russian Angara space launch vehicle. As other analysts have noted – and as this analyst concurs – Russia may already have facilitated the prototyping of a North Korean space launch vehicle design that shares design characteristics with the Angara.
Notably, North Korea, for the first time, claimed to have launched a space launch vehicle that made use of cryogenic propellants last year. That launch failed, but North Korea’s National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA), in a statement, was open about the use of a new launcher design. This was especially strange given that NATA had in 2023 ironed out difficulties with Pyongyang’s own Chollima-1 liquid-propellant space launch vehicle. Presumably, given its initial success with that launcher in 2023, NATA might have preferred to rely on this launcher; the introduction of a new, apparently experimental cryogenic propellant-based launcher, is circumstantially indicative of possible technical co-operation with Russian experts.
The transformative potential of Russia-North Korea technical co-operation should not be underestimated. Despite this, it is unlikely that Pyongyang will receive the full scope of irreversible knowledge transfer it seeks, particularly if Russia’s war against Ukraine reaches some kind of settlement or steady state in 2025. Because this would deprive Moscow of its short-term incentive to induce North Korea’s assistance, Russia may in turn be less inclined to expand the terms of its collaboration with Pyongyang.
There are other considerations, however. For instance, North Korea could seek involvement – with possible Russian support – in possible multilateral settlement talks in Europe with the status of a co-belligerent given the participation of Korean People’s Army troops in the war. Indeed, this possibility may explain Kim’s willingness to take what is a substantial risk with the decision to send troops to western Russia – and the even greater risk of openly acknowledging his participation internally in North Korea. Unlike material support alone, North Korea’s decision to join the war, as a treaty-codified Russian ally, may ultimately raise its international profile even further.
Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst/Oxford 2020). The Korea Foundation sponsored this paper as part of a project that explores ways of strengthening Canada-Korea ties in the Indo-Pacific.
