A deepening military and economic partnership between North Korea and Russia is systematically undermining the international sanctions architecture built over decades to constrain Pyongyang, while fueling a conventional arms buildup that raises the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula, according to a new analysis published by Foreign Affairs. 

Stanford scholar Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that the June 2024 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has functioned in part as a vehicle for sanctions evasion on an industrial scale. 

Russia has deployed its UN Security Council veto to dismantle the very enforcement mechanisms it once helped construct, blocking renewal of the expert monitoring panel that documented North Korean sanctions violations in March 2024, including Moscow’s procurement of North Korean artillery rounds and missiles for use in Ukraine, according to the analysis. 

Russia separately unfroze $9 million in North Korean assets held in Russian financial institutions in 2024, granting Pyongyang access to the international banking system for the first time in years, Mastro said. Russian ships have been openly flouting sanctions as they ferry munitions from North Korea and deliver oil in return, while official bilateral trade between the two countries reached a record $34 million in 2024, or nearly ten times the 2022 figure, suggesting financial flows that would be difficult to monitor through conventional compliance channels.

Since 2023, North Korea has supplied Russia with an estimated 6.5 million artillery rounds, along with long-range self-propelled artillery systems and multiple launch rocket systems, according to Ukrainian military intelligence estimates cited in the article. Ukraine’s military intelligence chief said in February 2025 that North Korea was providing roughly half the ammunition Russia was using at the front.

In return, Russia has provided North Korea with modern air defense systems, advanced electronic jamming equipment, and key components for a nuclear-powered submarine in the first half of 2025. Mastro also reports that North Korea is developing anti-satellite capabilities, drawing on Russian experience with such systems.

Around 15,000 North Korean troops have served in Russia’s Kursk region, with approximately 6,000 estimated killed or wounded as of February. Survivors returning to North Korea now serve as military instructors, institutionalizing battlefield lessons from Ukraine, Mastro writes. North Korean short-range ballistic missiles, which were failing at high rates and missing targets by up to two miles in early 2024, were striking within 55 to 110 yards of intended targets by early 2025.

Mastro warns that the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy did not mention North Korea, and that its 2026 National Defense Strategy’s push for South Korea to assume primary responsibility for deterrence underestimates the changed nature of the threat. Deterring North Korea now effectively means deterring China and Russia as well.

“The United States and South Korea are no longer up against North Korea alone,” Mastro writes, warning that a failure to maintain credible security commitments risks repeating the miscalculation of 1950, when ambiguous U.S. signaling contributed to the outbreak of the Korean War.

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