Kim Jong-un’s decision to send troops to fight on Russia’s side in the Ukraine War has naturally spurred much speculation about North Korea’s motives. Why did Kim Jong-un decide to plunge North Korea into its first major war in more than seventy years? 

Deciphering North Korean motives is notoriously difficult due to the lack of on-the-ground media access and the secretive nature of the regime. One popular explanation among Western analysts is that North Korea wants valuable combat experience, possibly in preparation for a more militant approach to South Korea. This explanation has gained some credence due to North Korea’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric vis-à-vis its southern neighbor throughout 2024 and the intensification of its missile testing in recent weeks. 

However, combat experience is only valuable if the soldiers return alive, and with Ukraine’s body count, that is far from certain. Ukraine will undoubtedly place an extra large target on their backs to deter other countries from entering the war on Russia’s side. But even if many North Korean soldiers do return home alive, all the combat experience in the world would not save North Korea were a war break out on the Korean Peninsula. 

North Korean strategists know that the regime would meet its demise in a war against South Korea and its American ally, which is why Pyongyang’s main strategic goal has for decades been to avoid a new Korean War. To do so, North Korea needs deterrence, not combat experience. And it already has the ultimate deterrents in its nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  

But if combat experience is not the motive, why did North Korea dispatch troops? The answer is probably a combination of two factors. 

The first factor is North Korea’s long-standing goal of circumventing international sanctions, especially those targeting its oil and gas imports. Russia is an attractive partner in this regard. 

The second factor is the relatively sudden emergence of an anti-U.S. coalition of countries whose goal of de-dollarization might make sanctions circumvention possible without making painful concessions to the United States. This makes North Korea less inclined to refrain from actions that provoke Washington. 

The sanctions regime against North Korea over its nuclear and missile testing has become one of the strictest in the world. This has been especially true since 2017, when sanctions began to target North Korean oil and gas imports. Without adequate access to fossil fuels, much of society stops functioning. 

This is something North Korea learned the hard way in the 1990s when the cessation of cheap oil from the Soviet Union contributed to a major famine. History also shows how desperate countries can become when their fuel imports are blocked. An American oil embargo, for example, was instrumental in Japan’s fateful decision to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. North Korea is likewise desperate to find ways to end the devastating sanctions, which even friendly countries like China and Russia at times have supported and implemented. 

The Ukraine War has allowed North Korea to circumvent the sanctions regime and obtain much-needed oil and gas from Russia, the world’s second-largest exporter of those commodities. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was North Korea’s most important benefactor, granting North Korea undervalued friendship prices on most goods, including oil and gas. 

Pyongyang would undoubtedly like to go back to those days. The Ukraine War has made such a return to the past possible. The comprehensive Western sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine have put Moscow and Pyongyang in the same boat of outcasts. This makes it highly unlikely that Russia feels any obligation to comply with the international sanctions against North Korea as long as Pyongyang gives Moscow something valuable in return. And North Korea has indeed done so. 

Not only has North Korea rhetorically supported Russia and consistently voted in favor of Russia in the UN General Assembly since the beginning of the war in 2022, but Pyongyang has also provided Moscow with about 16,000 shipping containers full of vital ammunition. In June, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, committing both countries to mutual defense and other forms of cooperation. The North Korean decision to send troops to fight for Russia, while dramatic, is a continuation of this strategic deepening of bilateral relations between two countries that increasingly see each other as useful. 

Russia needs skilled troops, and North Korea needs fuel. While there is so far no evidence of a “troops-for-oil” deal, no one should be surprised if such a deal exists, especially since recent reporting suggests that the North Korean military dispatches might not be a one-off occurrence but could become a far more permanent feature of Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow.  

Pyongyang’s decision to send troops to fight for Russia is purely transactional and, therefore, not that mysterious. The more interesting question is, why now? To answer that question, it is necessary to look at an important geopolitical development from the past year or so. The emergence of a loose coalition of countries opposed to the U.S.-led world order has significantly diminished North Korea’s incentive to avoid actions that Washington perceives as overly provocative. 

Until very recently, Pyongyang judged that sanctions relief could only be realized through negotiations with the United States. This is largely because the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency gives Washington a unique ability to enforce the sanctions regime against North Korea through threats of secondary sanctions against violators. 

Understanding the centrality of the United States, Kim Jong-un engaged in direct negotiations with Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019 and surprisingly signaled that even Pyongyang’s nuclear program was up for negotiation. For various reasons, the talks ultimately broke down, but they demonstrated that North Korea believed that the road to sanctions relief went through the White House. As long as North Korea regarded this as the only realistic pathway to sanctions relief, it refrained from taking actions that would be seen as excessively provocative in Washington. Sending troops to fight for a U.S. adversary was, therefore, a bridge too far even for North Korea, as that would, in all likelihood, have scuttled any hopes of removing the sanctions.  

However, the geopolitical situation has changed considerably over the past year. In this period, we have seen a loose but growing coalition of countries seeking to reconstruct the international order by diminishing the role of the U.S. Many of these countries harbor resentment towards the United States over what they, sometimes rightfully, feel is American hypocrisy on the world stage. Such resentment has grown stronger as the United States has turned a blind eye to Israeli war crimes in Gaza. 

This anti-U.S. coalition has found its clearest expression in the BRICS framework, which expanded from five to ten members in 2024. Dozens of other countries, including North Korea, have expressed an interest in becoming members in the future.  

One commonality among many of the existing and prospective BRICS members is that they are targeted by U.S. sanctions. Therefore, circumventing these sanctions by reducing the reliance on the U.S. dollar in trade is one of the coalition’s core aims. Needless to say, this relatively sudden emergence of a coalition of countries striving for an alternative to the U.S.-dominated global order changes North Korea’s calculus.  

If the challenge to the U.S.-led global order is successful, North Korea might not even need sanctions relief. It could simply trade with countries that do not see existing sanctions regimes as legitimate. Many countries in this new formation feel unjustly targeted by both U.S. and UN sanctions and would have little incentive to enforce the sanctions against North Korea. 

De-dollarization would also make it substantially harder for the U.S. to punish countries that trade with North Korea as secondary sanctions would become ineffective. As North Korea feels that its dependence on U.S. goodwill is decreasing, it is becoming increasingly emboldened to engage in actions that would have been considered too risky just a couple of years ago, including participating in a foreign war on the side of a U.S. adversary. 

North Korea’s decision to send troops to fight for Russia was primarily motivated by the prospect of cheap oil and gas. However, this decision was greatly facilitated by the new geopolitical alignment in the Global South, which has significantly lowered North Korea’s threshold for provocative behavior. How this will affect other North Korean policies, for example, nuclear testing, remains to be seen, but we should brace ourselves for a more unrestrained and unpredictable North Korea. 

That is an unpleasant prospect given that U.S. foreign policy under the incoming Trump administration is also expected to be more unrestrained and unpredictable.  

About the Author: 

Ulv Hanssen is an Associate Professor at Soka University’s Faculty of Law and an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.  

Image: Shutterstock.com.