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State of Play, a podcast and commentary series produced by the CSIS Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department, features timely analysis from CSIS’s leading regional experts on geopolitical developments and the future of the international order.
This week marks the one-year anniversary of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's honoring of combat soldiers fighting for Russia in Ukraine. The diplomatic dispute between South Korea and Ukraine over President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public disclosure that Kyiv had transferred two North Korean prisoners of war (POWs) to Seoul has deepened as South Korea removed embassy staff in addition to recalling its ambassador from Kyiv. The Lee Jae Myung administration has accused Ukraine of violating a confidentiality agreement when Zelensky revealed the POW transfer during his speech to the UN General Assembly and has deemed an apology insufficient. Since late 2024, North Korea has sent as many as 25,000 troops to fight for Russia in the war against Ukraine.
The stated reason by the South Korean side is the safety of the POWs and their families in North Korea due to the public reveal of the prisoner handover. But it is also clear that the Lee government is focused on establishing dialogue with North Korea. In his latest proposal tabled at the UN General Assembly in September, Lee called for peaceful coexistence with North Korea, excised denuclearization as a traditional objective of dialogue, and stated that he has no preconditions for a meeting with the North. In this context, Seoul probably sees the publicity surrounding the transfer of the North Korean POWs as complicating its strategy.
What is interesting, however, is that the anticipated pique from North Korea has not come. While Kim Yo-jong has made threatening statements about South Korean warning shots and loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border, the regime has not yet commented on or acknowledged the POW issue. Pyongyang has also made clear it has no interest in dialogue with Seoul, which raises the question of why the South Korean government has reacted so strongly to Zelensky’s statements. As my colleague Sydney Seiler noted on a recent episode of The Capital Cable, it is not implausible that the Lee government had already given a heads-up to Pyongyang about the transfer, hoping its silence would build some trust with the North that might in turn contribute to resumed inter-Korean dialogue. This is obviously something that the South Korean government would not state publicly, but it might explain Seoul’s level of anger.
If we were to apply Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is that the Ukrainian president didn’t know that there was a preexisting nondisclosure agreement between the two sides, perhaps at lower levels of the governments and militaries. But this seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that Zelensky used the world stage of the UN as a psychological operation against North Korea, the purpose of which was to suggest to North Korea that Ukraine had more North Korean POWs that it could turn over to the South. This would be about the only leverage that Ukraine has to attenuate North Korea’s supply of soldiers to Russia. For Pyongyang, a dead North Korean soldier is better than one held captive.
From Ukraine’s perspective, there has been no effective effort by any of the parties involved to stop the growing trade in arms and soldiers from North Korea to Russia. China has kept an arm’s-length distance, saying that it is a bilateral issue between the two sides. And Chinese leader Xi Jinping does not want to upset his “no limits” partnership with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The United States’ counterproliferation tools are not equipped to stop the military trade and troop movements at North Korea’s northeastern ports and across land deep into Russia. The UN Security Council is stymied by China’s and Russia’s vetoes to take any action sanctioning North Korea.
Ukraine has been the primary party bringing global attention to the depth of the relationship between North Korea and Russia. Thus far, publicized intelligence has been Kyiv’s primary instrument. Ukraine was the main source of public information, for example, on Russia’s use of North Korean Hwasong-11 (KN-23) ballistic missiles in the war, beginning in late 2023. Kyiv has also been the source of information with regard to the number of troops (as many as 25,000 so far) and laborers (between 12,000 and 25,000) going to Russia to fight on the battlefield or to work in Russia’s drone factories. In this context, the public reveal on the POW issue may be an attempt to exercise a new form of leverage over North Korea.
For South Korea, the Lee government will have to find some diplomatic solution behind closed doors with Ukraine rather than fighting it out in the press. Seoul has already committed that the current diplomatic row will not impact its assistance to Kyiv. At the same time, South Korea’s posture in the Russia-Ukraine war grows more complicated because of the Iran war. Seoul’s need to de-risk energy supplies from the Strait of Hormuz will compel it to seek some sort of agreement with Russia (potentially to secure Central Asian crude transported to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk).
For North Korea, the transfer from Ukraine to South Korea of North Korean POWs is about the worst-case scenario for its involvement in the European war. Even so, the costs of this do not outweigh the benefits of its continuing support for Russia in the war. CSIS estimates that North Korea has received up to $14 billion from its supply of troops, munitions, missiles, and laborers to Russia. This amounts to upwards of 50 percent of North Korea’s annual GDP, all unreported. Moreover, the relationship with Moscow has made Pyongyang less reliant on Beijing and therefore more unrestrained in terms of its policies. For example, if Iran were to approach North Korea about helping reconstitute its nuclear programs, China would probably discourage North Korea from doing this, but it’s unclear whether Russia would act similarly.
The relationship with Russia has also had some dramatic domestic effects for North Korea in terms of the suppression of markets. The market mechanism in North Korea, both formal and informal, has for the last three decades been a primary source of income generation and entrepreneurship and a channel for outside information for the North Korean people. The influx of food and fuel from Russia has allowed the government to regain control of the public distribution system and suppress the role of markets. Amendments to the Grain Management Law of 2022–2023, for example, outlawed the sale of staple grains such as rice and corn in the markets in favor of state-run grain shops. When this development is combined with the general suppression and lockdown of society during the Covid-19 pandemic, the North Korean state has gained a great deal more control over society and has undercut the power of the markets as an agent of change in the country.
Victor Cha is president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
