Russia, N. Korea Seal 5-Year Military Alliance

The depth of the arrangement is well-documented at this point. North Korea has deployed thousands of troops — Western intelligence assessments put the figure at between 10,000 and 15,000 — to support Russian operations in the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a cross-border incursion in August 2024. Kim's forces have also supplied Russia with artillery shells, ballistic missiles, and multiple-launch rocket systems, helping to replenish stocks depleted by three-plus years of high-intensity warfare. In return, Russia has provided Pyongyang with financial transfers, food, and energy commodities, along with military technology the nature of which Western governments have been unwilling to specify publicly.

“North Korean troops fought in combat conditions for which they had limited preparation — Russian tactical doctrine, European terrain, drone-saturated skies — and took casualties.”

The Kursk deployment is what drove Belousov's award ceremony. North Korean troops fought in combat conditions for which they had limited preparation — Russian tactical doctrine, European terrain, drone-saturated skies — and took casualties. Seoul's National Intelligence Service told South Korea's parliament in January 2026 that North Korean fatalities in Russia numbered in the hundreds; Belousov's ceremony effectively confirmed those losses without stating a figure.

The five-year cooperation framework signals something beyond transactional exchange. The 2024 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty between Moscow and Pyongyang obligated Russia to assist North Korea militarily in the event of external attack — a commitment that alarmed South Korea, Japan, and the United States when it was signed. The 2027–2031 plan, as described by both governments, would place that cooperation on a "stable, long-term footing," institutionalising military exchanges, joint exercises, and technology transfer at a level not seen since the Soviet era.

The complication is Russia's position. Moscow is not a rising power generously extending patronage; it is a sanctions-squeezed economy managing a war it cannot end quickly, whose GDP contracted 1.8 percent in the first two months of 2026 according to the Russian Economic Development Ministry. The technology Russia can offer Pyongyang in exchange for manpower and munitions is meaningful — satellite reconnaissance, submarine propulsion advances, re-entry vehicle engineering — but it comes from a country with diminishing industrial capacity. North Korea receives real value; what Russia receives in return grows more critical with every month of stalled ceasefire negotiations.

**What this means**

For South Korea, Japan, and the broader Indo-Pacific security architecture, the formalisation of Russia-DPRK military ties represents a structural shift that outlasts the Ukraine conflict. Even if a ceasefire is eventually reached in Ukraine, a North Korea with Russian military technology and combat-hardened troops is a different security problem from the one those countries were managing in 2023.

For the United States, the alliance complicates both the Ukraine file and the Korean Peninsula. Any future negotiation with Pyongyang over its nuclear programme must now account for Russian interests — and Moscow has every incentive to resist diplomatic progress that would reduce North Korea's strategic value as a partner.

For global arms control, the arrangement is a direct challenge to the framework built around the UN Security Council resolutions restricting North Korean weapons programmes. Russia, a permanent Council member, is both enforcer and violator of those restrictions simultaneously.

The five-year plan's signing — expected before the end of 2026 — will be the next concrete marker of how far Moscow and Pyongyang are prepared to take this partnership in public. Whether it includes mutual defence language beyond the 2024 treaty's provisions is the question analysts in Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo are watching most closely.