United States Institute of Peace

USIP’s Mary Glantz, Frank Aum, Carla Freeman and Andrew Scobell explain what’s behind Russia and North Korea’s deepening cooperation, what it means for China and how it impacts U.S. interests.

Why did Putin make his first trip to North Korea in nearly 25 years?

Glantz: Putin’s visit to Pyongyang is a follow-up to last year’s meeting in the Russian Far East. Both engagements were designed primarily to increase military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, which steadfastly supports Russia’s war against Ukraine. The 2023 visit was followed by the transfer of thousands of shipping containers full of munitions from North Korea to Russia, apparently including desperately needed artillery shells and missiles.

With the war against Ukraine turning into a grinding attritional slog, Russian forces are using more artillery shells and rockets than Russian factories can produce and are rapidly running through their stockpiles. North Korea is one of the only countries that will flaunt international sanctions against Russia and provide the munitions the Kremlin needs.

The details of the visit, however, suggest that Putin does not want to create the impression that he is just desperate for North Korean munitions. Before the visit even began, Russian press were touting Putin’s instructions to ink a Russian-North Korean comprehensive strategic partnership agreement, which, according to the text published by North Korea, commits both sides to support the other in the event of armed invasion or “unilateral compulsory measures.” Putin’s comments during the visit explicitly linked the need for the mutual defense aspect of this agreement to Western permission for Ukraine to use its weapons against Russian territory.

The signing of the agreement indicates that, as a result of his war against Ukraine, Putin is now “all in” in his relationship with North Korea. Prior to 2022 full-scale invasion, Russia was developing a strong economic relationship with South Korea as part of his “pivot to the East,” designed to develop Russia’s economy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent support for North Korea in the U.N. Security Council have destroyed that relationship and turned the “pivot to the East” largely into a “pivot to China (plus, apparently, North Korea).” This agreement will likely further estrange Russia from South Korea. Putin must also be careful to ensure his closer embrace of Kim does not cause problems for China’s Korea policy, as Beijing is an ally that Putin can ill afford to offend right now.

With Moscow increasingly isolated from the West, how does North Korea benefit from tightening ties with Russia? 

Aum: By agreeing to a new comprehensive strategic partnership with Russia, North Korea is unequivocally casting its lot with its historical ally to strengthen its global standing and internal security in defiance of the U.S.-led global order. With North Korea and Russia both facing international ostracization and sanctions, this elevated partnership means that the two countries will continue to broaden and advance bilateral military and economic cooperation. The most noteworthy aspect of the agreement is Article 4, which reinvigorates a Cold War-era mutual defense pledge that had been attenuated over the last three decades.

Russia has been providing North Korea with nutritional and energy assistance, satellite and military technology, and other types of diplomatic support in exchange for North Korean military and diplomatic aid for Russia’s war in Ukraine, including ammunition and ballistic missiles. In 2022, Russia vetoed additional sanctions against North Korea at the U.N. Security Council and this year helped dismantle a U.N. panel that monitored and investigated North Korea-related sanctions. With the updated partnership and the deterioration of the U.N. sanctions regime against North Korea, it is likely that U.N.-proscribed activities, such as Russia accepting additional North Korean laborers into the country, will intensify.

North Korea’s tightening of ties with Russia and other favorable countries like China also coincides with its estrangement from the United States and South Korea. Despite a nearly 50-year history of seeking engagement with the United States, Pyongyang has, since 2019, shunned talks with Washington and recently declared that it would not return to the negotiating table as long as denuclearization is on the agenda. Similarly, North Korea earlier this year announced its abandonment of a 50-year policyof peaceful unification with South Korea, calling it instead a separate country and “principal enemy.” All these developments mean that there is little urgency for North Korea to change its behavior and greater latitude for it to act in irresponsible ways.

What does the growing Russia-North Korea relationship mean for China?

Freeman: When Kim Jong Un visited Russia last year, Chinese media portrayed the growing Russia-North Korea relationship as a necessity forged in the face of the two countries’ economic isolation by the West. As strategic ties between Moscow and Pyongyang have deepened, China may appear to support Russia’s growing cooperation with Pyongyang — as it did in a recent abstention aligned with Russia’s vote against a U.N. resolution on a sanction committee for North Korea.

In reality, though, Beijing finds itself in a dilemma redolent of Cold War dynamics involving its two Northeast Asian neighbors. Six decades ago, as its relations with the Soviet Union frayed, it sought to maintain close ties to Pyongyang, seeing risks to its own security from a Soviet-North Korean alliance. However, stable relations between Beijing and Pyongyang proved elusive. North Korea remained the Soviet Union’s sometimes ally and relations with China were strained, even flaring into military skirmishes over a disputed border in the late 1960s.

Today, given Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s decision to bolster China’s strategic relationship with Russia, Beijing may believe that encouraging an emerging axis between it and its two nuclear-armed neighbors has value in complicating military and security planning by the United States and its allies. At the subregional level, China also has its own stakes in improved Russia-North Korea ties. China has long dreamed of widening access to international trade for economically struggling landlocked Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces via a port on the Tumen River Delta, territory controlled by North Korea and Russia. If North Korea and Russia could agree to a plan for the region, China might see progress toward this vision.

At the same time, however, there are several reasons why China is unlikely to embrace a trilateral alignment between itself, North Korea and Russia. For one, Beijing has made opposition to alliances and so-called “small blocs” a key theme of its campaign against the U.S.-led global order and the “Cold War mentality” it ascribes to Washington. More concretely, Russia's position on North Korea's nuclear weapons program is also quite different from China’s. While the latter sees North Korean nukes as a factor in impelling the United States to increase its nuclear assets focused on the region and has historically supported North Korea’s denuclearization, the former appears to have come to support North Korea’s nuclear deterrent.

In this context, Beijing is wary of the challenge to its own influence on Pyongyang as Moscow’s grows, potentially emboldening undesirable provocative behavior from North Korea. In addition, given the expanding Chinese-Russian trade and military ties, Russia’s deepening economic and military cooperation with North Korea could strain China’s economic and diplomatic engagement with South Korea. As Putin and Kim signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty, senior Chinese and South Korean officials were engaged in a rare "two plus two” diplomatic and security dialogue to discuss bilateral concerns and rising inter-Korean tensions.

Perhaps most significantly of all, given the fact that North Korea has already provided artillery ammunition and short-range rockets to Russia that are being used against Ukraine, a perception that it has forged a trilateral security arrangement with North Korea and Russia would almost certainly impede its efforts to boost its sluggish economy by expanding trade with the West, with Europe a recent target of a Xi charm offensive.

What does this all mean for U.S. interests?

Glantz: Every container load of munitions that Pyongyang sends to Russia is bad for U.S. interests. Those shells and rockets enable the Russian war machine to kill Ukrainians and destroy their critical infrastructure. And those munitions embolden Putin and encourage him to pursue his uncompromising agenda. With obtaining more weapons and munitions as likely Putin’s primary goal for deepening Russia’s relationship with North Korea right now, this visit harms U.S. interests.

But the visit also signals that Putin is desperate enough to embrace a rogue international figure for support. Though of questionable quality, North Korean munitions are a problem for Ukrainians who will be attacked by them. Still, they are not sufficient to turn around the increasing deficit between what munitions Russian forces need to win and the munitions they actually have. North Korean military supplies to Russia will likely just prolong the inevitable as Western munitions providers ramp up production.

What Russia is providing North Korea in exchange for these weapons may be of even greater concern to U.S. policymakers. During Kim’s visit last year to the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Putin promised to help North Korea develop its satellite capabilities. North Korea is also reportedly getting valuable testing data from its rockets being used against Ukraine.

Scobell: Yet things could be much worse the United States and its allies and partners. A trilateral convening featuring not just Putin and Kim but also Xi would have been very bad news. After all, a second Putin-Kim summit in the space of nine months combined with the strong personal relationship between Putin and Xi, who have held regular bilateral summits for years, certainly raises the prospect of a China-Russia-North Korea trilateral. But this has yet to happen and is unlikely to occur for reasons outlined above.

Two points merit mention here. First, China and Russia each have a strong preference for maintaining exclusive bilateral relationships with North Korea as they joust for influence in Pyongyang. Dating back many decades to the Cold War, Moscow and Beijing have been rivals for influence in Pyongyang.

Second, Pyongyang also has an abiding preference for one-on-one dialogues so it can maximize its leverage with each patron. Pyongyang has a severe asymmetry of power in comparison with other more sizeable states. Yet, over the decades, little North Korea has played the game of great-power competition with impressive aplomb. Pyongyang has skillfully played Beijing, Moscow and Washington against each other, which raises the question of whether the behavior of Russia or China vis-à-vis North Korea should be characterized as “balancing” or “bandwagoning.” Normally, it would be the lesser power that balances or bandwagons with the greater power. Arguably, the relationships of Moscow and Beijing with Pyongyang have been anything but normal.

In sum, although the three dictators are unlikely to unite to form a three-way alliance, they are likely to consult, coordinate and even collaborate to the detriment of U.S. interests. But this seems most plausibly to play out in bilateral configurations rather than as part of a grander trilateral axis of authoritarians.

Aum: At the same time, the explicit establishment of a coalition opposed to the U.S.-led global system may present a broader strategic concern for the United States. In Putin’s letter to Rodong Sinmun, an official North Korean newspaper, he stated that Russia and North Korea would work together to oppose the “unilateral and illegal restrictions” of U.N. sanctions and develop an “equal and indivisible security architecture in Eurasia.” He also discussed an “alternative trade and mutual settlement mechanism not controlled by the West,” and the need to confront “the ambition of the collective West to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world order.”

Although the list of countries eager to align with this alternative framework may be short, open defiance of the U.S.-led system by two nuclear-armed countries, one of which is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, suggests that the international order in place since post-World War II may be crumbling.