The full-scale armed invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, conceived as a “blitzkrieg,” has turned into an exhausting war of attrition, exposing the catastrophic incompetence of the Russian military leadership and the degradation of the defense-industrial complex. Putin’s Russia, boasting its prowess, has effectively shifted to external life support. The leading donor to the “half-alive organism” of Russian aggression has become North Korea, a pariah state now dictating terms to the Kremlin.
According to the latest report from South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), the scale of Pyongyang’s support for Russia is staggering. From August 2023 to December 2025, the total amount of military assistance provided by North Korea to Moscow is projected at an astronomical $14.4 billion.
This figure includes not only millions of artillery shells and ballistic missiles but also the deployment of personnel. For comparison: the scale of North Korean support is comparable to the annual defense budgets of some European countries. Without such infusions, Russian artillery on the front would have fallen silent by 2025, and Moscow’s offensive potential would have been nullified by shell starvation and massive losses in equipment.
For Pyongyang, the Russian invasion has become a unique historical opportunity. American intelligence and Western analysts, particularly from CSIS and RUSI, emphasize that North Korea is using Ukrainian battlefields as a giant laboratory. Here, new tactics are being tested as North Korean generals study in real-time how their doctrines perform against modern Western equipment.
There is also a technological testing of North Korean weapons. Missiles like KN-23 and KN-24 are being tested against air defense systems similar to those deployed in Seoul. Pyongyang obtains data on the accuracy, vulnerability to electronic warfare, and effectiveness of its systems in intense combat conditions.
Finally, Kim Jong Un’s army is enhancing its combat skills. For the first time in decades, North Korean soldiers are gaining real operational experience, which they plan to later utilize on the Korean Peninsula.
In this scheme, Russia plays the humiliating role of a “junior partner,” providing its territory and the lives of Ukrainians to strengthen the most dangerous regime in East Asia.
The Kremlin pays for its survival with its most precious assets: its own military technologies. In exchange for millions of shells and thousands of North Korean “volunteers,” Moscow, according to South Korean sources, transfers critically important developments in missile engines, satellite systems, and possibly nuclear technologies to Pyongyang.
This is not just “assistance to an ally,” but an obvious act of desperation. Putin deliberately destabilizes the situation in the Asia-Pacific region, if only to delay the moment of his own military defeat in Ukraine. Russia has effectively become a sponsor of the modernization of North Korea’s army, turning Pyongyang into a global threat.
History will set everything in its place, but the interim result is clear: the myth of Russia as a “great power,” capable of standing alone against the West, is completely shattered.
Without North Korea’s help, Russia would have long since suffered a collapse in this inept, protracted, and immoral war. The fact that a “nuclear superpower” is forced to bow to Kim Jong Un, begging for old Soviet shells and North Korean infantry, is the best evidence of the strategic deadlock in which Putin has led his country.
Today, the Russian army relies on “North Korean supports,” but how long will this rotten framework stand when the cost of outsourcing lives and weapons becomes unaffordable even for the Kremlin?
One thing is clear: Pyongyang’s intervention only prolongs the agony of Putin’s system, making its fall even more painful and disgraceful.
