North Korea is making its ballistic missiles more accurate and has started mass-producing attack drones, largely with Russian help, the New York Times reported on October 23.
Moscow is paying for North Korean ammunition, missiles, labourers and soldiers with military technology, operational know-how and data on how North Korean weapons perform in combat, the paper said. The war in Ukraine has given Pyongyang "a live combat laboratory".
The exchange gives North Korea things that decades of sanctions and isolated test launches never could. As IntelliNews reported, the cooperation is part of the expanding informal military alliance between the four members of the CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) that have been swapping technology as part of the East-West showdown.
North Korean ballistic missiles are already an important part of Russia’s missile arsenal against which Ukraine currently has no defences. Its missiles are now fired against modern, Western-supplied air defences, and the results come back to its engineers. Russia has also helped it build its own production lines for strike drones and loitering munitions. For South Korea, that means a neighbour whose missiles are getting harder to stop at the same time as it learns to swamp defences with cheap drones.
Russian telemetry and performance feedback had improved the guidance accuracy and manoeuvrability of North Korea's tactical ballistic missiles, raising both the conventional and the nuclear threat to the South, the Kyiv Post reported.
In early October North Korea test-fired a tactical ballistic missile that it says can carry a nuclear warhead. South Korean and Japanese tracking put its flight at about 700 km; Pyongyang claimed 1,000 km. A day later President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia was sharing its jet-powered drone technology with North Korea. "They're sharing with North Korea all the technologies," he said.
Seoul's answer broke with its usual practice of issuing a brief condemnation after a Northern launch. Five days after the North's test, South Korea carried out the first test of its own home-built hypersonic ballistic missile, with President Lee Jae-myung watching. It also plans to raise defence spending from 2.8% to 3.5% of GDP, the New York Times said.
In a drill in September, a swarm of North Korean drones attacked an island target while cruise and ballistic missiles struck it from several directions at once. It is the formula Russia uses against Ukraine, drawing on a production run of some 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4s a month built to outrun interceptors. The paper warned of a "deepening imbalance between low-cost attacks and high-cost defenses", and countering it could force South Korea and its allies into an expensive overhaul of their air and missile defences.
The trade runs under the strategic partnership treaty Russian President Vladimir Putin signed in Pyongyang in June 2024, which includes a mutual defence clause. North Korea has sent artillery shells and ballistic missiles to Russia, and Ukrainian and South Korean estimates put the number of North Korean troops sent since 2024 at 14,000 to 15,000, most of them to the Kursk region. In a birthday message to Putin on October 7, Kim Jong Un promised to broaden cooperation and predicted victory in Russia's "sacred war of justice". Zelenskiy said in August that Russia plans to station up to 50,000 North Koreans on its territory.
Analysts quoted by the New York Times warn that if Russian help gives North Korea a credible ability to strike the US with nuclear weapons, Washington's commitment to defend South Korea could weaken.