Kim's Wager: How North Korea Is Trading Soldiers for Technology

Since late 2024, Kim Jong Un has sent more than 20,000 North Korean soldiers to fight for a war that has nothing to do with Korea. By British and South Korean intelligence estimates, roughly 6,000 of them are dead — a casualty rate approaching 50% among deployed units. Kim keeps sending more anyway. The reason is that he is not paying in blood for nothing: in exchange, North Korea appears to be getting exactly the things decades of sanctions were designed to keep it from having.

The deployment

North Korea's first major troop commitment came in late 2024: 14,000 to 15,000 soldiers sent to Russia's Kursk region to help repel a Ukrainian incursion, organized into five infantry brigades. South Korea's National Intelligence Service assessed roughly 11,000 — about 10,000 combat troops and 1,000 engineers — remained in Kursk as of early 2026. By August 2026, Defense News reported around 9,500 still in the region, though not all were actively engaged in front-line combat.

The losses have escalated fast: British intelligence and NIS estimates went from roughly 600 dead in April 2025, to 2,000 by September 2025, to around 6,000 by early 2026. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia is seeking to bring in as many as 30,000 North Korean troops in total, with new facilities reportedly being built in Voronezh; a new North Korean missile unit of roughly 90 personnel was reported deploying there. Russia has also said North Korea will supply 1,000 combat engineers and 5,000 construction workers for mine clearance and rebuilding in Kursk.

Why Kim keeps paying the price

The North Korean soldiers who survive don't simply come home. Reporting citing South Korean intelligence indicates roughly 3,000 veterans of the fighting have already rotated back to North Korea as military instructors, transmitting what analysts describe as "21st-century warfare skills" — drone tactics, electronic warfare, coordinated artillery fire — to the rest of the Korean People's Army at a scale and realism no peacetime exercise could replicate. For a military that hasn't fought a real war since 1953, that alone may be worth the losses to Kim's calculus.

The ammunition pipeline

Troops are only part of the exchange. Ukrainian intelligence estimates North Korea has supplied roughly 4 million artillery and mortar shells since mid-2023, alongside long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems — Ukrainian officials have assessed this accounts for something like half of Russia's front-line munitions needs at points in the war. North Korea has also delivered at least 148 KN-23 and KN-24 short-range ballistic missiles, with roughly 40 more supplied recently and at least two fired directly at Ukrainian targets. A Reuters/Open Source Centre analysis tracked 64 cargo ship voyages carrying nearly 16,000 containers of ammunition between September 2023 and March 2025 — a sustained industrial-scale logistics operation, not a one-off gesture.

The treaty that made it official

None of this is improvised. In June 2024, Putin and Kim signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty including a mutual defense clause committing each country to assist the other if attacked — formal language echoing a Cold War-era Soviet-North Korean pact that had lapsed. In immediate terms, analysts say Pyongyang is also collecting hard currency and oil, both in chronically short supply under sanctions.

Why this matters beyond Ukraine

The strategic prize for Kim is bigger than any single weapons system. Russia is a permanent UN Security Council member that can now be counted on to shield North Korea from further sanctions resolutions — ending the near-total diplomatic isolation Pyongyang has lived under since the 1990s. A North Korean military that has rotated thousands of troops through a real, modern war against a NATO-equipped adversary is a fundamentally different deterrent than the untested conscript army of five years ago. And a Kim who has an alternative patron in Moscow has less need of Chinese or American goodwill — which is exactly why any future denuclearization negotiation just got harder, not easier. The US Treasury sanctioned additional entities tied to the military cooperation in December 2024, and South Korea has blacklisted individuals and organizations involved; neither has done anything to slow the ships moving through the Sea of Japan.