Kim Gains From Russia's War What Isolation Never Gave Him and the Geometry of the New World Order

At the beginning of September, a new road bridge opened across the Tumen River between Russia and North Korea. Soldiers and weapons could soon be rolling across it, headed for a war that has brought Pyongyang in from the cold. That war has given Kim Jong Un what he had been missing for decades. He already had powerful allies. What he lacked were allies who actually needed him.

Since the summer of 2023, North Korea has been one of Moscow's most important suppliers of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles. In July, South Korea's central bank estimated that the country's economy had grown by more than 3 percent for the third year in a row. That means it has overcome what began in 2017, when the toughest United Nations sanctions package up to that point went into effect. The road there ran through a slow reopening. The pandemic had pushed North Korea into near-total self-isolation, with trade with China dropping from $2.8 billion in 2019 to $318 million in 2021. By 2023, it had climbed back to around $2.3 billion. Fuel and machinery started coming into the country again, and North Korean goods once again found their way onto the Chinese market.

Kim made construction and the provinces a matter of state policy. In 2021, a program began to build 50,000 apartments in Pyongyang, and in 2024 came the "20×10" policy, which is supposed to modernize factories in 20 cities and counties every year for 10 years. Where the capital and heavy industry once got almost everything and the provinces were left to fend for themselves with outdated facilities, food and basic goods are now supposed to be produced across the country. Whether the new factories can keep running with electricity shortages and scarce materials remains an open question.

The satellite images show activity. Construction started just weeks after the program was announced, factories appeared in every participating location during the first year, and hospitals and agricultural facilities were added in 2025. In February 2026, the authorities declared the capital's housing program complete, with most of it concentrated in the new Hwasong district, which rose on former farmland. Visitors report taxis ordered through apps and payments made on screens. There are also imported cars from China, brought into the country in violation of sanctions. Most of the money for all of this came from the war. According to South Korean intelligence, North Korea had delivered more than 15 million artillery shells to Russia by August 2026. The Institute for National Security Strategy estimates revenue from weapons alone at more than $10 billion, an enormous amount for a country with annual economic output of around $27 billion. The roughly 15,000 soldiers sent to Russia brought in hundreds of millions more, with only a small portion of that money flowing into the state budget. The rest was likely paid in technology and materials or remains outstanding.

The amount of the payments is not the decisive point. What matters more is that Moscow is hollowing out the sanctions from within. They worked after 2016 mainly because Russia and China took part in isolating Pyongyang, cutting off its access to fuel and foreign currency as well as export markets. Today, Russia buys the very weapons those restrictions were aimed at and at the same time supplies what the sanctions were meant to keep away. Moscow also provides military technology, ranging from air defenses to missile and satellite technology, for an army that still relies heavily on Soviet-era equipment.

The weight of this reversal can be seen in Putin himself. In 2017, he still condemned North Korea's nuclear tests outright and insisted that Russia fully complied with Security Council resolutions. In 2024, he traveled to Pyongyang and signed a mutual defense treaty. At the same time, he had billions of dollars' worth of ammunition purchased. In March 2024, Moscow blocked an extension of the UN panel of experts that monitored the sanctions, taking one of the Security Council's sharpest tools out of its hands.

North Korea's old burden has become its asset. During the Korean War, communist China intervened out of fear that a country aligned with Washington would emerge on its border, and to this day North Korea remains Beijing's only mutual defense obligation. Since the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang had little to offer its powerful neighbors, with a domestic market too poor to matter and a steady stream of scandals surrounding its nuclear program. The war turned that around. What once made the country a burden, its weapons and its willingness to supply them, suddenly became valuable.

North Korea's new independence has also pushed Beijing back into action. In June 2026, Xi Jinping visited North Korea for the first time in seven years and promised further support. By giving Kim another source of assistance, Moscow forced Beijing back into competition. Kim now takes economic help from China and weapons from Russia. He keeps both at a distance and lets neither take its influence for granted.

The Geometry of the New World Order

What is emerging in Beijing is more than symbolic politics. The deepened cooperation between Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang has concrete effects on the global security architecture. North Korea’s massive munitions deliveries to Russia - experts speak of millions of artillery shells and tens of thousands of soldiers - have influenced the course of the war in Ukraine. In return, Pyongyang receives not only economic support but possibly also advanced military technology that could take the North Korean missile program to a new level.

China, which controls 98 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade and has remained Russia’s most important economic partner, plays a key role in this constellation. Beijing’s strategy is subtler than Moscow’s open confrontation or Pyongyang’s provocations, but no less effective. By maintaining economic ties with both countries, China effectively undercuts Western sanctions regimes and creates an alternative economic space that is increasingly escaping Western influence.

Traveling on a heavily armored and escorted special train, the North Korean dictator crossed the border into China on September 1, 2025, to attend celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The signing of the defense pact between Putin and Kim in June of this year, which provides for mutual military assistance, has fundamentally changed the security equation in East Asia. Although China has not formally joined this pact, the demonstrative unity at the military parade sends a clear signal: these three powers see themselves as a counterweight to the Western-dominated international order.

That is why Pyongyang no longer needs rapprochement with Washington as urgently as it did in 2018, when Trump and Kim became the first leaders of their countries ever to meet face to face. Back then, the country was almost completely cut off, and the United States could offer eased sanctions and normal relations in exchange for concessions. Today, Kim has kept his arsenal and expanded his missile program. He has restored his trade. Much of what only an agreement with America once promised, he has found another way to obtain.

Trump has pushed for renewed talks since returning to the White House. On August 16, just hours before the annual "Ulchi Freedom Shield" exercise with South Korea was due to begin, he ordered it sharply scaled back. The exercises were expensive and sent a completely inappropriate and hostile message to Pyongyang, he said, while North Korea had behaved harmlessly and respectfully under him. Eleven days became five. His reasoning was unusually open: Seoul had refused to support the United States in the denuclearization of Iran, and North Korea, he wrote, had behaved "non-threateningly and respectfully" during his presidency. The exercises were expensive and unnecessarily hostile toward Pyongyang. Because a complete cancellation was no longer possible just days before they began, he said he had instructed War Secretary Pete Hegseth to significantly reduce their scope. Later, Washington also canceled joint amphibious exercises scheduled for September. The reason was not diplomatic consideration but a lack of troops. The war with Iran is now tying up so many American forces that Washington could no longer provide enough personnel for exercises at the division level.

Because North Korea sees such exercises as rehearsals for an invasion, this looks like a concession for which Trump did not even demand a meeting with Kim. Whether his anger that Seoul refused to back him in the war against Iran also played a role remains unclear. He acted similarly in 2018 after the first meeting in Singapore. Back then, however, the strongest period of rapprochement between North and South since the division was underway, and Moon Jae In and Kim had declared that there would be no more war between the two Koreas.

None of that closeness remains. Pyongyang has rejected reunification and declared the South an enemy. It had roads and rail lines that were once supposed to connect the two sides destroyed. Kim no longer sees his nuclear weapons as bargaining chips. To him, they are part of the state and a guarantee of its sovereignty. According to experts, the U.S. war against Iran confirmed for him that the attack on Tehran was only possible because the country lacked nuclear deterrence. A meeting with Trump could happen at any time, according to Seoul, but under very different conditions than before.

On the peninsula itself, the balance still clearly favors the South. In 2025, South Korea's national income was 56 times higher than the North's, and Seoul's military budget alone exceeds Pyongyang's estimated entire economic output. The People's Army is large, but technologically inferior and dependent on old equipment. There is only one area where the gap is narrowing - population. South Korea's birth rate fell to 0.8 children per woman in 2025, between 2019 and 2025 the number of 20-year-old men dropped by 30 percent, and the army shrank by 20 percent to 450,000. Around 50,000 troops are missing, so far offset by increased recruitment and technology.

The 129-page document comes from the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. The study is titled "Social Change in North Korea 2012-2020" and examined how everyday life, social structures and North Korean society changed during those years. It is part of the institute's academic series and serves as a South Korean research foundation for studying North Korea's development under Kim Jong Un.

In the North too, the birth rate of 1.8 is below replacement level, and since 2020 the working-age share of the population has been shrinking by nearly 1 percent a year. Kim sends young people into mines and onto farms and pulls married women into factories. The North's advantage is only a delay, because the same problem will eventually hit it too, with fewer resources to soften the blow. But that delay could be enough to alter the balance before that happens.

Since the late 1980s, time had been working for Seoul. Its economy grew and its military became stronger while the North grew poorer. It can no longer be said that time is working only for the South. If Trump and Kim sit down at a table again, the United States will no longer be facing the isolated outsider of 2018. It will be facing a country that has learned how to survive on its own terms as the old order breaks apart.