Will North Korea's growing relationship with Russia lead to a global war?

The news that thousands of North Korean troops have been sent to Russia and have now been deployed to Kursk has stocked fears that Pyongyang's news relationship with Moscow could lead to global war.

However, Russia and North Korea haven't always been so close. The two global pariah states have been pushed together out of necessity and it is a major problem for world peace and stability.

When the world learned that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was planning a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in person in 2023, it set off alarm bells about the potential for weapons transfers between the two outcast powers. 

Global fears regarding possible weapons transfers were quickly realized in the aftermath of the meeting when White House officials released images showing increased land and sea shipping activity between the two countries. 

Pentagon National Security Press Secretary John Kirby explained to reporters that North Korea shipped more than 1,000 containers of munitions and military equipment to the Russians to help Moscow with its war in Ukraine. 

Kirby also claimed that Kim wanted to acquire sophisticated weapons technologies from the Russians in exchange for North Korea’s munitions and military equipment in order to boost his nuclear program according to NBC News. 

Regardless of whether or not the quid pro quo exchange of goods between North Korea and Russia proved true, which it later did, it was a sign the nature of politics in the region is changing as Moscow looks to strengthen alliances where it can. 

North Korea has since allegedly sent more than 13,000 shipping containers of military assistance to Russia according to South Korean intelligence that was cited by Newsweek. These containers may have held as many as 6 million artillery shells.

Sanctioned and locked away from the rest of the world, Russia has become a pariah on par with the North Koreans when it comes to global influence. This has pushed Moscow into a new era of relations with North Korea according to the Kyiv Independent. 

Russia and North Korea have had a rather close but contentious relationship ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia is one of very few countries to maintain an embassy in North Korea; the relationship hasn’t always been rosy. 

Moscow has supported several sanction-imposing resolutions against Pyongyang in the United Nations, which included votes in 2010, 2013, and 2017. Moreover, Putin has said that Russia would continue to impose these sanctions even after Kim’s visit. 

In late 2023, the growing cooperation between Russia and North Korea may just have been what some could call a marriage of convenience. Both countries were exploiting the current geopolitical situation at the time to get what they wanted from the other, and that relationship has deepened. 

“The situation is still purely based on the idea that we'll give you something, and we want something in exchange,” Natalia Matiaszczyk, an expert on the situation from the Polish think tank Institute for New Europe, told The Kyiv Independent in October 2023. 

“There's no ideological cooperation," Matiaszczyk added. But this doesn’t mean that the changing nature of Moscow in Pyongyang’s current relationship won’t impact security in the region, especially when it comes to technology transfers. 

Foreign Policy’s Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote in their analysis of the summit between Putin and Kim in 2023 that it wasn’t necessarily a sign North Korea was moving closer to Russia but rather away from the United States. 

“It appears that Pyongyang has concluded that long-term geopolitical trends call for a realignment with Moscow and Beijing as the most practical and probably safest path for North Korea to follow,” Carlin and Hecker wrote. 

However, such a realignment will necessitate closer ties between Pyongyang’s enemies in the region. Tighter cooperation with Russia will likely force Japan, South Korea, and the United States closer according to Matiaszczyk, something China doesn’t want. 

How this complicated situation would unfold was not known in 2023. But what was clear is that both Moscow and Pyongyang intended to continue their deeper cooperation after a recent visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to North Korea. 

“Both sides had an in-depth exchange of views on intensifying joint action on several regional and international issues including the situation on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asian region and reached a consensus of views on them,” North Korea state media announced according to Reuters. 

Since North Korea's initial rapprochement with Russia, the Kremlin has gained military assistance, ballistic missile supplies, and now soldiers to help in Russia's war against Ukraine while North Korea has presumably received material and technological help to advance its military aims.

Putin visited North Korea for the first time in 24 years, signing a security pact with Kim Jong-Un that essentially amounted to a mutual defense pact between the two countries, something that could be the first step in drawing more countries into a larger war...