Yongusil: Russia’s New Great Game on the Korean Peninsula
Russia and North Korea’s newly revived relationship is focused on security, but goes beyond the Ukraine conflict. | Image: TASS.
If the nature of DPRK-Russia official exchanges over the past seven years is a metric of the direction of the Moscow-Pyongyang relationship, “security” has no doubt taken its place as the central theme.
For many analysts, Article 4 of the 23-article comprehensive strategic partnership agreement signed by North Korea and Russia in 2024 stood out the most. It was arguably the most relevant for outside observers since the post-2022 “new reality” for bilateral ties. Yet, more than the signing of a mere document, Russia’s diplomatic actions toward North Korea have signaled the centrality of security and defence in the relationship.
In 2018, Russia’s top visitors to North Korea included senior lawmaker Valentina Matvienko and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (whose invitation to Kim Jong Un to visit Russia went unfulfilled for nearly a year). Yet, since the DPRK’s reopening in 2023, aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin himself travelling to sign an agreement with mutual defense provisions, then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev have also visited the DPRK.
The upsurge in DPRK-Russia bilateral relations is a notable development in and of itself, given that Moscow-Pyongyang ties, already modest before 2020, were pushed to their limit due to North Korea’s hermetic self-containment during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Within this context, the emphasis on security is in notably marked contrast to much of the post-Cold War era, during which time Pyongyang had not considered the Russian Federation to be of particular importance in security multilateralism.
In order to understand what motivates Moscow’s push for greater security cooperation with Pyongyang, it is important to remember that a driver of North Korea-Russia security relations from the Russian perspective has been Moscow’s perpetual sense of strategic vulnerability in Northeast Asia, a sub-region where the Kremlin has had little security influence for decades, yet must contend with a strong strategic US presence.
Russia as a security actor in Korea
Rendered in the form of a Korean-language idiom, the phrase ahn mi gyeong jung (“안미경중: America for security, China for economics”) is a commonly used phrase in South Korean geopolitical discourse in the context of Seoul’s longtime strategic ambiguity. Artyom Lukin, a Russian expert on Korean security, argues that current circumstances indicate that for North Korea, China will remain the country’s main economic partner, and that Russia may become its main defence partner. Could we therefore see a similar security-economy phenomenon occur with the DPRK, a ahn ro gyeong jung (안로경중) of sorts?
This is in many ways doubtful. North Korea well remembers how Moscow essentially abandoned its cause in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Furthermore, a self-declared nuclear state in its own right does not necessarily need an ally such as the Russian Federation. Even if North Korea may be of roughly the equivalent strategic value as Belarus to Russia, Moscow’s nuclear doctrine would not cover the DPRK in the way that it would other Russian allies. Not only does the DPRK not need Russian deterrence if it has its own WMD capabilities, an attempt by Moscow to bring North Korea under its nuclear umbrella would conceivably undermine the value of the Kremlin’s de facto recognition of the DPRK as a nuclear state.
Even so, as Oxford University’s Edward Howell argues, the DPRK’s sense of being perennially threatened by the United States has no doubt driven North Korea closer to Russia. Yet, even as Pyongyang sees benefit in a closer security partnership with its old friend Moscow, the question of what motivated the Kremlin to pursue security ties with Russia spurs a range of answers from analysts. Certainly, the answer that most readily comes to mind is that Russia needs North Korean supplies and troops to feed its war machine in Ukraine. This, however, does not offer a full explanation of what animates the Kremlin’s interests in a closer security partnership with North Korea.
For Moscow, security cooperation with the DPRK also presents the Russian Federation with an opportunity to strengthen its own security in Northeast Asia. Specifically, this is the strategic side of the DPRK-Russia partnership that goes beyond mere requests for assistance from North Korea in the Russia-Ukraine war. For the Russian Federation, an enhanced security partnership with the DPRK is an asset for Russia in the Moscow-Washington strategic rivalry.
Between Heartland and Rimand: The Copenhagen School and DPRK-Russia Security Ties
The Korean Peninsula is hardly what first comes to mind when one thinks of Russia-US great power rivalry in Eurasia, at least not in the modern era. In both academic regional studies and policy-based areas of responsibility, Korea is located firmly within the purview of East Asia analysis. The North Korea-Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, however, has brought the Russian Federation more deeply into Korean security than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. This, in turn, has brought the Peninsula ever more deeply into the scope of Russia-US strategic rivalry.
Compensating for the region-based dissonance between the Korea peninsula and Eurasia is Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver’s Regional Security Complex Theory developed at the Copenhagen School of International Relations. Buzan and Wæver posit that various regions and sub-regions comprise various security complexes based on securitized issues within these geographic frameworks, to facilitate cross-regional comparisons in security studies.
Regional Security Complex Theory helps explain Moscow’s role in Korean security in a number of ways. First and foremost, Russia, which firmly belongs in the Eurasian regional security complex and which has largely lost ground to China as an influencer in East Asia in the post-Cold War years, has managed to penetrate the Northeast Asian regional security complex by means of its treaty alliance with the DPRK.
The US, for its part, tends not to view Northeast Asia as a realm of geostrategic competition with Russia. Moscow, however, does not feel this way: Its sense of strategic vulnerability toward the US on the Korean Peninsula extends to the early 20th century, when Washington helped broker the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War. Throughout the Cold War, although the USSR largely felt it had sufficient strategic depth in Eurasia after WWII, the area around the Korean Peninsula remained the greatest point of peripheral vulnerability for the Soviet Union. Since the 1990’s, Moscow has faced a situation where it remains frustrated by the constant US strategic presence in Northeast Asia, but with little leverage to influence security dynamics on the Korean Peninsula.
By abandoning its support for UN sanctions against Pyongyang, as well as its post-Cold War strategy of “equidistance” between the two Koreas, and its inking of a mutual defence agreement with the DPRK, the Kremlin appears to have found a way to push back strategically against Washington in Northeast Asia. In essence, Moscow appears to have exchanged the pursuit of multilateral diplomacy over Korean peninsula security to a type of security friendshoring with Pyongyang. Buzan and Wæver’s theoretical contributions to the field of international relations facilitates our understanding of the spillover effects of Russia’s pursuit of strategic depth in Eurasia on the Northeast Asian security environment.
Of course, whether the DPRK-Russia relationship is primarily transactional or strategic remains to be seen. Nevertheless, a combination of international relations theory and cross-regional analysis provide evidence buttressing the idea that the partnership is in fact of a more strategic than transactional nature.
Anthony V. Rinna’s “The North Korea–Russia Strategic Partnership and Moscow–Washington Great Power Rivalry in a Regional Security Context” is forthcoming in the Fall 2025 edition of The North Korean Review Journal.
