There’s been much speculation about North Korea’s motives for sending troops to Russia. The dispatch of around 10,000 troops by North Korea to Russia for deployment in the war against Ukraine is already Pyongyang’s largest-ever troop deployment to a foreign conflict. With regular rotations of soldiers, according to Ukraine’s ambassador to South Korea, around 100,000 North Korean soldiers could fight for Russia within a year. 

Though unconfirmed, South Korean intelligence estimates that Russia pays each soldier about $2,000 monthly, most of which likely goes to the North Korean government. Altogether, that would be over $20 million, a very significant sum that equates to about half of what North Korea earned from officially registered exports to China, its main trading partner, in all of 2020. North Korea is also expected to receive crucial military technology from Russia for its development of ballistic missile submarines and advanced satellites. North Korea, perpetually strapped for energy and fuel, has also received large-scale oil deliveries from Russia throughout 2023 and 2024, likely in exchange for its munitions transfers to Russia.

There is, however, another, less tangible gain. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the war’s framing as the epicenter of a broader battle between liberal democracy and its enemies, fits remarkably well into the North Korean view of history, foreign policy, and the world. Dispatching troops to fight another country’s war might carry a domestic risk for Kim Jong-un, especially if these soldiers begin returning home on a large scale in body bags. At the same time, the war in Ukraine is in many ways exactly what North Koreans have been taught to anticipate for decades: a great showdown between anti-imperialist states and imperialism and global capitalism.

Comrades in Arms

The role of history in the North Korean worldview can hardly be overestimated. The mythical history of the partisan movement of the country’s first president, Kim Il Sung, is constantly held up for the population as a model to emulate. North Korea’s citizens are often reminded of the many invasions the Korean Peninsula has suffered over its history; they have been taught that a country’s dignity and independence can only be guaranteed through the correct ideological mindset and military preparedness. The fall of global communism and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s is portrayed not as an ideological failure, but as a temporary setback on the road to socialism’s inevitable global victories that Kim Jong Il supposedly wrote about in 1994: “Although socialism is temporarily experiencing a heart-rending setback because of opportunism, it will without fail be revived and win ultimate victory for its scientific accuracy and truth.” 

Perhaps for some, the geopolitical setback never fully came true. When speaking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two sources inside North Korea have referred to the war as a “civil war” in interviews with Rimjingang. This online news outlet maintains contact with ordinary North Koreans.

This worldview is not a North Korean invention but deeply rooted in socialist thought. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Vladimir Lenin describes imperialism as a logical consequence of capitalism and its ever-growing thirst for resources. Eventually, imperialism will die out together with capitalism, as the latter crumbles under its internal contradictions. 

This process has taken an important place in North Korean ideological thought, with Kim Il Sung laying out in the 1960s that the dictatorship of the proletariat must remain in place not only until full communism is achieved on a national level but also until capitalism has dissipated entirely as a global system.

Whether Marxist-Leninist thought has truly been the central guiding ideology for the North Korean regime is debatable. But at the very least, it has influenced its worldview and perception about global conflicts. Socialism may become more central, as North Korea has officially abandoned the idea of unification with South Korea, which it had long held up as its central vision. Ideology is far from the main reason for North Korea’s troop dispatch to Russia. 

What Binds the DPRK and Russian Federation Together

Having North Korean soldiers fighting in what its state media portrays as a global clash between capitalism and imperialism on the one hand and national self-determination on the other, fits well with the worldview the regime conveys both domestically and internationally. North Korea claims to be subject to the same attempts by imperialist forces of regime change and expansion by the West that Russian propaganda has cited as one of the reasons for the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s war of conquest is, in a way, North Korea’s war too.

This is at least in part what Kim Jong-un seemed to be saying on November 18, 2024, when he addressed a conference of battalion commanders and political instructors of the Korean People’s Army. The address garnered some attention in international media, mostly for Kim’s proclamation of unlimited nuclear weapons expansion and war readiness. The views expressed by Kim about the world and North Korea’s place in it, however, were just as interesting.

Kim did not speak openly about the troop deployment to Russia, but almost seemed to allude to it, talking about the present, “historic time, when the prestige and honor of our legendary army is being fully demonstrated in all the theatres of the revolution seething with struggles and transformations.” 

In an echo of Lenin’s theory on international conflict, Kim tied North Korea’s situation to that of Russia, citing NATO’s increased collaboration with South Korea and Japan as part of the same “criminal actions that NATO committed to creating a security crisis in Europe by steadily expanding its military alliance system and pursuing its unjustifiable eastward advance policy.” For Kim, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, in other words, part of the same anti-imperialist struggle that North Korea wages.

For now, it seems the regime has managed to contain the news about its troop deployment from the broader public. Popular discontent might begin to grow if, or when, North Korean families start to lose their sons to the war. But at the same time, the regime may well be successful in convincing the public that this is a necessary sacrifice in the same “sacred war” against imperialism and global capitalism that the regime has spoken about for decades.

About the Author

Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein is an Assistant Professor in Korean Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an Associate Fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stimson Center. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. 

 Image Credit: Creative Commons and/or Shutterstock.