Commentary: The Russian relationship with North Korea opens the door to further nuclearisation

BUSAN, South Korea: This year is a turning point in the effort to blunt North Korean nuclear weaponisation. It is the year that any meaningful multilateral cooperation failed, and that two great powers – China and Russia – seemingly came to accept unchecked, unsupervised North Korean nuclear progression. 

Russia’s open alignment with the North earlier this year was the main blow. Russia in March used its United Nations Security Council veto to effectively end UN monitoring of violations. China abstained from the vote. 

It was not always this way. When North Korea first detonated a nuclear weapon in 2006, there was widespread regional anxiety. The United States and its regional allies, South Korea and Japan, were predictably nervous, but so were China and Russia.

Both knew from long experience with North Korea during the Cold War how prickly and unpredictable the Pyongyang regime is. Neither wanted North Korea to collapse, of course.

Both valued it as a regional distraction of the Americans and their allies. But neither wanted North Korean nuclearisation either. That was a step too far.

Consequently, Beijing and Moscow supported multilateral sanctions, approved by the UN Security Council, against the North to slow its nuclear march. They supported such resolutions nine times, a remarkable amount of cooperation with America which demonstrated just how nervous a North Korean nuclear weapon made almost everyone. 

For a decade or so, there seemed to be genuine shared interest among China and Russia on the one hand, and the US, South Korea, and Japan on the other. Had this cooperation held, the North Korean weapons of mass destruction programme would be less further along than it is today.

NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR SUPERPOWER AMBITIONS

In a speech marking North Korea’s founding anniversary last month, leader Kim Jong Un said that the country is now carrying out a construction policy to increase its number of nuclear weapons "exponentially". On Oct 8, state news agency KCNA reported Kim as saying again that North Korea will accelerate efforts to become a military superpower with nuclear weapons. 

In June, the Arms Control Association estimated that North Korea had enough fissile material to build 70 to 90 nuclear warheads, but that it had likely assembled closer to 50. By 2027, North Korea could secure enough nuclear material for 200 warheads, experts have said.

Unfortunately, larger geopolitical rifts have filtered down to sanctions enforcement. Individual countries must enforce UN sanctions, and Russia and China have repeatedly defected on enforcement cooperation to signal displeasure to the democracies over various issues. 

In the Russian case, that included its creeping subversion of Ukraine, which began with the seizure of Crimea in 2014.

For China, poor enforcement was the biggest problem. Chinese smugglers made rich profits moving illegal goods across the border. Similarly, Chinese banks could charge high fees against North Korean elite monies, because no other bank would accept them. This occasionally led to sustained China-US tension but to little avail. 

Beijing has consistently maintained it enforces the sanctions it has endorsed, but in recent years, its stance seems to have shifted. 

China seems to have increasingly accepted North Korean nuclear weapons. For example, in 2022, it vetoed new sanctions on North Korea that were proposed following repeated ballistic missile launches. In July 2023, vice chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee Li Hongzhong attended a huge military parade in Pyongyang, where Kim rolled out his most powerful nuclear-capable missiles.

Beijing also seems worried that sanctions enforcement will turn North Korea against China, sending it off to find a new sponsor. 

RUSSIA’S TURN TOWARDS NORTH KOREA

It is really Russia’s turn towards North Korea – for help in its war in Ukraine – which represents a much greater threat in the coming years. Where China looked away on sanctions-busting, Russia will actively assist North Korea.

Russian banks are now sanctioned by the free world banking system, so there is no reason to block North Korean business in Russia.

Similarly, Russia faces a shortage of bullets and artillery shells because of the war. North Korea has huge stockpiles of these going back decades, and most of that ammunition is interoperable with the Russian army. That is, Russia can use it immediately, because the North Korean military was modelled on the old Red Army of the Soviet Union.

US State Department analysts estimate that North Korea has shipped at least 11,000 containers of munitions or related materials to Russia since September 2023, aiding its war efforts in Ukraine. 

On Oct 9, Ukraine said that it had struck a depot in western Russia that housed ammunition made by North Korea. Separately, six North Korean soldiers were also killed in a recent missile attack by Ukrainian forces on Russian-occupied territory near Donetsk on Oct 3, according to Ukrainian media.

In return for its assistance, North Korea will almost certainly demand valuable military technology and materials, although there is much debate on just how much Russia will give away.

Presumably it is wary of conceding its best technologies, fearing (probably correctly) that North Korea will proliferate anything valuable given to it. Russia’s various challengers and competitors, including China, would likely be willing to pay North Korea for Russian technologies, if only to know what the Russians have. 

But Russia is in a tight spot. Its war in Ukraine has dragged on for two and a half years. Its economy is suffering from the costs of the war and consequent international economic isolation. It is now highly dependent on Chinese assistance and forbearance, which is likely deeply humiliating for a country with great power pretensions.

A relationship with North Korea gives Russia an alternative, at least militarily, to an embarrassing dependence on Beijing.

Thus, if the war continues, Russia’s willingness to trade valuable technologies for assistance will likely increase. North Korea will surely take Russian food and hydrocarbons for its impoverished economy.

According to South Korea, North Korea has already received more than 9,000 containers from Russia, mostly containing food supplies. But what it almost certainly wants most are advanced nuclear and missile technologies. 

For now that appears to be working. But there is no guarantee that such swaps will not be made in secret, and it would certainly make sense for North Korea to use Russian desperation to bargain for what it really wants. 

So even if China posits to cleave to the sanctions on North Korea, Russia’s open alignment with North Korea, symbolised by the visits shared between the two countries’ leaders in June, effectively signals the end of sanctions – and, if Russia becomes desperate enough, the proliferation of Russian military high technologies.

Robert Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly) is a professor of political science at Pusan National University.