The war in Ukraine has done for North Korea what neither Singapore nor Hanoi could achieve: Pyongyang has broken out of isolation without surrendering a single nuclear warhead. Trump is eager to return to the negotiating table, while Kim Jong Un, for the first time in three decades, can afford not to hurry.
On March 1, 1946, during a rally in Pyongyang, someone threw a grenade toward the platform where the young Kim Il Sung was standing. Soviet Lieutenant Yakov Novichenko caught it, pressed it against his body, and lost an arm. Eighty years later, on September 7, 2026, the first road bridge in history connecting Russia and North Korea was named after him. Trucks carrying flags began crossing the kilometer-long, two-lane span over the Tumen River, running from Khasan in Russia’s Primorye region to North Korea’s Rason Special Economic Zone. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and North Korean Premier Pak Thae Song opened the crossing by video link.
The symbolism was deliberate. Moscow is once again shielding the North Korean regime from a blow, except this time the blow is called UN sanctions, and Russia is protecting Pyongyang out of strictly military necessity, with no ideological kinship involved. In return, North Korea sends shells, missiles, and soldiers to the war in Ukraine.
According to the Russian government, the bridge is designed to handle up to 300 vehicles a day. The figure is modest, and it is a projected capacity rather than actual traffic. More revealing is something else: construction began on April 30, 2025, and just sixteen months later vehicles were already crossing it. In a region where the old Friendship railway bridge, built in 1959, had been rusting for decades without major repairs, such speed says more about priorities than any official communique. The Russian-North Korean border is only seventeen kilometers long. That entire narrow corridor now serves a single purpose.
The Shell Economy: How a Pariah State Achieved Growth Europe Might Envy
In July, the Bank of Korea, South Korea’s central bank, estimated North Korea’s economic growth at more than 3 percent. It was the third consecutive year of expansion. For a country that in 2017 endured its deepest contraction since the famines of the 1990s, this is a reversal that no one would have dared predict even five years ago.
A qualification is necessary. The South Korean central bank’s methodology relies on indirect data, satellite imagery, and intelligence estimates, and its precision should not be overstated. The direction of travel, however, is confirmed by every available indicator.
The starting point was catastrophic. Pyongyang responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by sealing its borders more tightly than almost any other country in the world. Trade with China, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of North Korea’s foreign economic ties, collapsed from $2.8 billion in 2019 to $539 million in 2020 and just $318 million in 2021. The country effectively stopped receiving fuel, fertilizer, spare parts, and consumer goods. Freight traffic began slowly recovering only in 2022, and by 2023 bilateral trade had returned to roughly $2.3 billion.
At the same time, Kim Jong Un launched two programs unusual for North Korea’s traditional economic model. In 2021, the authorities announced a plan to build 50,000 apartments in Pyongyang over five years. By February 2026, the program was declared complete, with most of the housing constructed in the new Hwasong district on former agricultural land. In 2024, the government launched the Regional Development 20×10 Policy, requiring the state to modernize or build factories in twenty cities and counties every year for ten years. The emphasis is on food processing, clothing, and everyday consumer goods.
For North Korea, this shift is almost revolutionary. For decades, Pyongyang and defense-oriented heavy industry consumed the lion’s share of investment, while the provinces survived on worn-out Soviet machinery and jangmadang markets, where private trade replaced state distribution. Satellite images showed construction beginning only weeks after the 20×10 program was announced, and by the end of the first year factories had indeed appeared in every participating locality. In 2025, hospitals, recreational facilities, and rural infrastructure were added to the program.
Foreign visitors who have been to Pyongyang since the pandemic describe a different city: taxi-booking apps, QR-code payments, food and medicine delivery services, and new restaurants. Broad avenues originally built with military parades in mind have begun filling with cars for the first time. Most vehicles come from China, circumventing the UN sanctions ban on vehicle imports.
Construction and the consumer sector, however, explain only part of the miracle. The money came from war.
The Sanctions War Devoured
In the summer of 2023, then Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu flew to Pyongyang. He was shown the country’s latest missiles and drones. In September of the same year, Kim Jong Un traveled to Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome, and from that point North Korea became one of the Russian military’s principal arsenals.
According to South Korean intelligence, by August 2026 North Korea had transferred more than 15 million artillery shells to Russia. For comparison, the same intelligence service put the figure at 12 million in 2025. The ammunition was supplemented by short-range KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles, fragments of which Ukrainian specialists reported finding after strikes on Kyiv and Kharkiv, as well as 170-millimeter Koksan self-propelled howitzers and 240-millimeter multiple-launch rocket systems.
An analytical institute affiliated with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service estimates North Korea’s revenue from arms exports alone at more than $10 billion. North Korea’s GDP is commonly estimated at roughly $27 billion a year. In other words, over three years, military exports generated an amount equivalent to roughly one-third of the country’s entire annual output. No sector in the history of the North Korean economy has produced anything comparable.
These figures must be viewed in light of their source. Seoul has an interest in presenting Moscow-Pyongyang cooperation as maximally threatening, particularly in its dialogue with Washington. Independent verification is almost nonexistent. The order of magnitude, however, is supported indirectly: throughout 2024, satellite imagery recorded dense ship and rail traffic between Rajin and Russia’s Far East, while Ukrainian forces repeatedly reported North Korean markings on unexploded munitions and missile debris recovered both on the front lines and in residential areas.
In the fall of 2024, people began moving as well. Roughly 11,000 to 12,000 North Korean troops were deployed to Russia’s Kursk region. The contingent was later reinforced, and estimates suggest that about 15,000 personnel in total passed through the combat zone. Moscow and Pyongyang publicly acknowledged their participation in fighting only in April 2025. South Korean intelligence estimated North Korean casualties in the spring of 2025 at around 4,700, including roughly 600 killed. Payments for the soldiers are believed to amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, although only a small portion appears to have entered the North Korean budget directly. The rest was probably compensated through technology, components, and raw materials, or remains outstanding as debt.
The central issue is not even the money. The sanctions regime constructed by the UN Security Council in 2016 and 2017 was the toughest in the organization’s history. Resolution 2397, adopted on December 22, 2017, capped annual supplies of refined petroleum products to North Korea at 500,000 barrels, required North Korean workers abroad to return home, and shut down nearly all of the country’s exports. The entire structure rested on one condition: Moscow and Beijing had to be willing to participate. Both capitals voted for the resolutions.
My generation, which witnessed the end of the Soviet Union, remembers the autumn of 1990 well. On September 30, Moscow established diplomatic relations with Seoul, and Pyongyang regarded the move as a betrayal. The North Korean Foreign Ministry handed the Soviet side a memorandum stating that North Korea would henceforth provide for its own security, including through weapons it did not yet possess. For more than thirty years, Russia moved step by step away from Pyongyang. In 2017, Vladimir Putin said Russia “unequivocally condemns” North Korea’s nuclear tests. In June 2024, he flew to Pyongyang and on June 19 signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, Article Four of which provides for immediate military assistance if either party comes under attack.
Three months earlier, on March 28, 2024, Russia vetoed the extension of the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea. Since 2009, the panel had documented sanctions-evasion schemes ranging from ship-to-ship oil transfers on the high seas to billion-dollar cryptocurrency thefts by North Korean hackers. It ceased to exist on April 30, 2024. Independent researchers calculated that by the end of 2024, Russia had supplied North Korea with more than one million barrels of oil, twice the annual ceiling permitted by the UN.
Moscow has reversed its role completely. It once restricted Pyongyang’s access to resources; now it buys the very products targeted by sanctions and supplies what those sanctions prohibit. According to South Korean and Western institutions, technology is also part of the exchange, ranging from air-defense systems to satellite technology. The Korean People’s Army still relies primarily on Soviet-era equipment and improvised modernizations of it. Access to Russian expertise, including experience from an actual war involving the mass use of drones, is invaluable.
From Baku, this story looks particularly instructive. Azerbaijan knows from its own experience what Security Council resolutions are worth when they are not backed by the will of major powers. Four resolutions adopted in 1993, 822, 853, 874, and 884, demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territory and remained on paper for almost three decades, until Azerbaijan itself restored its territorial integrity in 2020 and 2023. The North Korean case reveals the other side of the same coin: a permanent member of the Security Council can first vote for resolutions and then personally dismantle the mechanism designed to monitor their enforcement.
Beijing Grows Jealous: How Moscow Pushed Xi Jinping to Fly to Pyongyang
North Korea’s problem was never a lack of patrons. China entered the Korean War in 1950 and, according to various estimates, lost between 180,000 and 400,000 people rather than allow the American military to reach the Yalu River. The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed on July 11, 1961, remains China’s only mutual-defense alliance commitment.
The problem was different. After the Cold War, Pyongyang had little to offer. Its domestic market was impoverished, while nuclear tests and missile launches regularly embarrassed its patrons before Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. Beijing kept North Korea on a short leash by rationing oil and food and viewed it more as a burdensome buffer than as a genuine partner.
The war in Ukraine overturned that logic. The very qualities that once made North Korea toxic became assets. Its enormous stockpiles of Soviet-caliber artillery shells, accumulated for a war that never came, suddenly became essential to an army consuming them by the tens of thousands every day. A willingness to disregard international opinion became a useful trait for a country that had itself fallen under sanctions.
Beijing reacted late, but it reacted. In September 2025, Kim Jong Un stood on a reviewing platform in Beijing alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin during a parade marking the eightieth anniversary of victory in World War II. An image that would have been almost unimaginable five years earlier circulated around the world. Then, on June 8 and 9, 2026, Xi Jinping traveled to Pyongyang on a state visit, his first in seven years. Significantly, the trip was the Chinese leader’s first foreign visit of 2026. The official occasion was the sixty-fifth anniversary of the 1961 treaty, while the outcome included promises of continued support and a long list of agreements restoring exchanges across various sectors.
The meaning of the visit required no interpreter. Beijing had watched its influence over Pyongyang diminish with every trainload of shells heading for Russia and decided to recover lost ground. Without intending to, Moscow created a market of competing patrons for Kim. China underwrites his economy; Russia provides military technology and diplomatic cover at the UN. Neither partner can any longer take its influence for granted, and Kim is skillfully exploiting that competition. His grandfather, Kim Il Sung, spent decades maneuvering between Moscow and Beijing during the Sino-Soviet split. The grandson has returned to the family trade.
Trump Pays in Advance, Kim Does Not Send the Bill
From the first days of his second term, Donald Trump made clear that he wanted to resume talks with Pyongyang. His most significant move came on August 16, 2026. Just hours before the start of the annual US-South Korean Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, the president wrote on social media that he had instructed Secretary Pete Hegseth to substantially scale them back. Trump described the exercises as expensive and as sending North Korea an “inappropriate and hostile” signal. He said it was already too late to cancel the maneuvers entirely.
The consequences were more serious than they initially appeared. The exercises, scheduled to run from August 17 through August 27, ended on August 21 after only five days. The second phase, devoted to counteroffensive operations, was canceled entirely. That is precisely the phase Pyongyang traditionally describes as a rehearsal for invasion. A significant share of the fourteen planned field exercises at battalion level and above were converted into national-only drills or postponed. Washington later canceled joint amphibious exercises scheduled for September as well.
One detail went almost unnoticed in the news coverage. The 2026 exercises were supposed to test readiness for transferring wartime operational control of forces to Seoul. A successful evaluation would have allowed the future Combined Forces Command to be certified at full operational capability and opened discussion of a transfer timetable. The test never took place. The result was paradoxical: Washington has spent years demanding that Seoul assume greater responsibility for deterring North Korea, and then Washington itself disrupted the process designed to formalize that transition.
South Korean officials acknowledged that they had not been informed of Trump’s decision in advance. In addition to his warm relationship with Kim, the US president cited Seoul’s refusal to support Washington in the war against Iran as one reason for the decision. The exercises became both an instrument for punishing an ally and a gift to an adversary.
Pyongyang’s response was conspicuously cool. Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s sister and one of the regime’s principal voices on foreign policy, said on August 19 that shortening and scaling back the exercises did not change their “provocative and aggressive nature.” She denied Trump’s claim that Kim Jong Un had responded to his request for talks and separately mocked Seoul over its unenviable position. Yet the tone of the statement was noticeably milder than usual, and she described her brother’s relationship with Trump as excellent. On the eve of the exercises’ conclusion, North Korea launched a salvo of short-range ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan, adding to launches conducted on August 6 and August 12.
In 2018, the situation looked different. After the Singapore summit on June 12, Trump similarly suspended Ulchi Freedom Shield and similarly echoed North Korean rhetoric about costly provocations. Back then, however, the gesture was part of a broader thaw. On April 27, 2018, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un signed the Panmunjom Declaration stating that there would be no more war on the peninsula and pledged economic cooperation and movement toward reunification. Trump also received something in return: a summit meeting and Kim’s signature on a commitment to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Today, Trump has given up the exercises without receiving anything in return. No meeting, not even a vague promise.
The Iranian Lesson: Why the Bomb Can No Longer Be Bought at Any Price
The context of 2026 differs radically from that of 2018. In December 2023, Kim Jong Un declared that the two Koreas were no longer one nation but two hostile states. Reunification was removed from official doctrine. In October 2024, North Korean demolition teams blew up sections of roads and railways that Moon and Kim had once promised to connect. The constitutional commitment to nuclear status had already been enshrined in 2023.
South Korean intelligence says another Trump-Kim meeting could be arranged at any time, but under completely different conditions. Pyongyang no longer regards its nuclear arsenal as something to bargain away. The bomb has become part of the state’s identity and the regime’s principal guarantee of survival. Estimates of the number of warheads vary. The most commonly cited figure is around fifty, with sufficient fissile material for many more, while figures heard in Seoul in recent months have been considerably higher, exceeding one hundred in some cases. The range itself is revealing. No one knows precisely what negotiators would be dealing with across the table.
The US war against Iran has only reinforced a conclusion Pyongyang had already reached. From the perspective of North Korea’s leadership, the logic is brutally simple: Tehran was attacked because it lacked a credible nuclear deterrent. Libya abandoned its program in 2003, and eight years later Muammar Gaddafi was killed in Sirte. Ukraine surrendered the Soviet nuclear arsenal under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and got a war. Iran stopped at the threshold and got a war as well. For Pyongyang, these three examples add up to an irrefutable argument, and no American security guarantees can outweigh it.
This leads to the central conclusion about any future negotiations. Washington and Seoul still formally demand the complete and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea. Pyongyang refuses even to discuss the premise. Any realistic compromise, if one is possible at all, would concern limits on further expansion of the arsenal, a moratorium on intercontinental ballistic missile testing, and measures to reduce the risk of nuclear use. Any such agreement would effectively acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear power. Trump, for whom a dramatic image may matter more than the architecture of nonproliferation, could well accept such an outcome.
Seoul Is Rich, but It Is Running Out of Soldiers
Despite Pyongyang’s recent gains, the military balance on the peninsula still favors the South. The Korean People’s Army is enormous and occupies a central place within the North Korean state, but technologically it remains decades behind. In 2025, South Korea’s nominal gross national income was more than fifty-six times that of North Korea. South Korea’s annual defense budget alone exceeds the estimated value of North Korea’s entire economy. Roughly 28,000 American troops remain stationed in the southern half of the peninsula.
Seoul’s vulnerability lies elsewhere. In 2025, South Korea’s total fertility rate was about 0.8 children per woman, one of the lowest levels in the world. Demography, discussed for decades as a pension-system problem, has finally reached the barracks. Between 2019 and 2025, the number of twenty-year-old men fell by 30 percent, while the active-duty armed forces shrank by one-fifth to 450,000 personnel. The manpower shortage, according to various estimates, reached roughly 50,000 service members.
Seoul is patching the gaps by recruiting more professionals and women and relying increasingly on automation. The arithmetic of conscription does not change. Every new generation of recruits is smaller than the one before it.
North Korea looks better only by comparison. According to UN estimates, North Korea’s fertility rate in 2025 was around 1.8, also below replacement level. The small generation born during and after the famine of the 1990s has already reached military age. According to available information, the authorities have relaxed physical standards for recruits and are bringing more women into the armed forces. Since 2020, the working-age population has been declining by nearly 1 percent a year, young people are being sent to mines and farms, and married women are being mobilized for factory work.
The demographic balance is shifting in two directions at once. In the coming years, Seoul is losing its conscription pool faster than Pyongyang, and this is one of the few northern advantages that cannot simply be offset by the South’s economic power. Over the long term, North Korea will hit the same wall while possessing far fewer resources for maneuver. The North’s current advantage is better understood as a reprieve. But it is a reprieve lasting perhaps fifteen to twenty years, and over such a period the military balance can change substantially, especially if Russian technology continues to flow.
There is another factor absent from every demographic table. Roughly 15,000 North Korean soldiers have passed through a modern war involving mass use of drones and electronic warfare. The South Korean military has had no comparable combat experience since 1953. Against that backdrop, the reduction of joint exercises in August 2026 looks especially ill-timed.
Who Pays for the North Korean Miracle
The list of losers is long. Ukraine comes first. By many estimates, North Korean artillery shells gave Russian forces a multiple advantage in artillery fire during critical periods in 2023 and 2024, while KN-23 missiles struck Ukrainian cities. Every railcar that passes through Khasan prolongs the war.
The second loser is the global nonproliferation architecture. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rests on a simple bargain: countries forgo the bomb in exchange for security and access to peaceful nuclear technology. North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003, conducted six nuclear tests, the latest on September 3, 2017, and now receives money, technology, and a mutual-defense treaty from a permanent member of the Security Council. Every regime with nuclear ambitions can observe that trajectory and draw its own conclusions.
Seoul is the third loser. President Lee Jae Myung, who took office in June 2025, had based his approach on reducing tensions with the North and maintaining pragmatic relations with Washington. In August 2026, he found himself with an ally that scaled back exercises without warning and a neighbor that interpreted the concessions as a sign of weakness. Debate over an independent South Korean nuclear arsenal, which has been underway for years and enjoys majority support in public opinion surveys, received fresh momentum.
Japan receives its own bill. Tokyo remains within range of North Korean missiles, watches American security guarantees become bargaining chips, and is compelled to accelerate its own military buildup.
Two players are winning. Kim Jong Un has secured money, technology, two competing patrons, and an American president willing to pay in advance. Russia has obtained ammunition, accompanied by manpower, and an ally in the Far East capable of diverting Washington’s attention. China occupies a more ambiguous position: it is restoring its influence over Pyongyang but must share that influence with Moscow while tolerating the strengthening of a nuclear-armed neighbor on its border.
A One-Way Bridge
Since the late 1980s, almost every long-term trend had worked against North Korea. The South became wealthier and modernized its military; the North became poorer, suffered famine, and sank ever deeper into isolation. Western capitals assumed that time was working against Pyongyang and that sooner or later the regime would either collapse or trade away its bomb for survival.
Neither happened. The gap between the two Koreas remains enormous, but the certainty that time is on Seoul’s side has disappeared. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, all of the principal sources of pressure on North Korea have weakened simultaneously: sanctions have been undermined from within the Security Council, major powers are once again competing for its loyalty, the economy is growing, and the American president himself is seeking a meeting.
I will risk two predictions that should be easy to test. First, if Trump and Kim meet before the end of 2027, the final document will contain no North Korean commitment to work toward denuclearization of the kind Kim signed in Singapore on June 12, 2018. The subject of the deal will be limits on the arsenal, not its elimination. Second, the spring Freedom Shield exercises in March 2027 will be conducted in a reduced format without a full-scale counteroffensive phase, and Washington will present that as a gesture of goodwill while Pyongyang will again say it is insufficient.
One question remains, and I do not have an answer to it. What happens to this entire arrangement when the war in Ukraine ends and Russia no longer needs North Korean shells? Moscow knows how to forget its allies. Pyongyang already learned that lesson on September 30, 1990.
For now, trucks continue crossing the Yakov Novichenko Bridge. A Soviet lieutenant once absorbed a grenade meant for Kim Il Sung and lost an arm. The grandson of the man he saved has received new protection from Russia without sacrificing anything in return.
Others are paying the bill.