Russia Triples Explosives Production and Still Needs North Korea

An analysis of freight train data shows how Moscow's weapons chemistry depends on just a handful of plants, while North Korean ammunition keeps rolling out of Nakhodka despite all the reports claiming otherwise. The chemist Dmitri Mendeleev is said to have uncovered the secret of French gunpowder by reading railway freight records. From a railroad company's annual report on freight movements, his son Ivan later recalled, his father had calculated the necessary ratio of the substances. Historians of science doubt whether a child could later reproduce exactly what he had heard at such a young age. But the idea still holds today. What a war economy produces reveals itself in what moves along its tracks.

That is exactly what the research into freight movements between August 2025 and February 2026 does. The descriptions of the goods and their destinations make it possible to reconstruct the relationship between the production and consumption of explosive materials. At first, the result reads like a success story for Moscow, but on closer inspection it turns into a story of dependence. Russia's production of gunpowder and explosives has roughly tripled compared with the prewar period, and it still is not enough for the front.

The photo shows a new building in the northern part of the February 11 factory complex that, after the roof work was completed, was gradually covered with earth and embedded into the hillside. Today, the facility is barely visible from the outside.

Because at the same time, more supplies keep coming in. Around 59,000 tons of explosive materials entered the country through the Far East during the period examined, most of it through Nakhodka. The most likely source is North Korea, which supplies artillery shells and charges. KN-23 missiles are part of it as well. The cargo rarely goes straight to the front. It first disappears into depots in the rear. Western research groups had long since shown that North Korea was behind these shipments. In 2024, CSIS concluded from high-resolution satellite imagery that around 2.5 million artillery shells had reached Russia by early 2024, mainly through the port of Vostochny near Nakhodka and the neighboring port of Dunay. Later analyses counted between 4.2 million and 5.8 million shells delivered between August 2023 and March 2025, a period of 20 months.

South Korean intelligence estimated that around 12 million shells had entered the country by July 2025, 2 to 2.5 times as many as the numbers found in other investigations. It provided no evidence for that figure, which is why the lower estimate for that period is the better supported one.

Then came the turnaround, at least in the reports. At the end of 2025, Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency HUR, said North Korea had run out of shells. There had allegedly been no delivery at all in September 2025, and Pyongyang had switched to supplying drones instead. Reports from South Korea in early 2026 also said ammunition deliveries had fallen sharply.

The tracks tell a different story. Even in 2026, cargo marked "explosive materials" was still leaving the port of Nakhodka, and its destinations were artillery depots. The obituary for North Korean supplies came too soon.

The major production chains for gunpowder and high explosives begin in the same place, with nitric acid. Without it, there is no gunpowder and no high explosive. At the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026, practically only 2 suppliers fed the military industry: EuroChem in Novomoskovsk, owned by Andrey Melnichenko, and the Azot plant in Berezniki. Both facilities have already been hit by drones, the one in Novomoskovsk several times. Ukrainian drones know this weakness and keep coming back to it. An entire arms industry depends on 2 addresses.

From there, the acid flows into the explosives plants. TNT is produced mainly in Biysk in the Altai region, at the Sverdlov plant in Dzerzhinsk, and at Promsintez in Chapayevsk. Between August 2025 and February 2026, Biysk received around 16,000 tons of toluene and 1,000 tons of hexamethylenetetramine, an indication of high TNT output and its own RDX production. Dzerzhinsk received acetic acid for RDX and HMX. Chapayevsk received 3,000 tons of toluene, roughly as much as Dzerzhinsk, both for TNT.

This is where the bad news for Ukraine lies. For years, Dzerzhinsk alone produced practically all of the RDX. Now, according to freight data, Biysk has built up its own production, something that had previously only been announced as a project. The old monopoly is broken, and a second site is feeding the ammunition supply.

From the major plants, the material moves on before it reaches the front. The Sverdlov plant produces high explosives itself and also receives another 12,000 tons from Biysk to turn into finished ammunition. Deliveries from Biysk run as far as the Plastmass plant in Kopeysk and the Amur Cartridge Plant. At the same time, the freight data does not include cellulose deliveries or the routes taken by finished ammunition to the depots, which means every one of these figures remains a lower bound.

How much the gunpowder plants can produce is revealed by the amount of nitric acid and melange delivered to them. It goes to the gunpowder plants in Kazan and Perm. Tambov is part of it as well, along with the Aleksin Chemical Plant. Additional quantities go to the Ural plant in Solikamsk and to the Kamensky combine in the Rostov region. The Avangard plant in Sterlitamak is also on the list. The jump is enormous. In the half-years of 2019 and 2020, the military plants received between 21,000 and 24,500 tons of nitric acid including melange. Between August 2025 and February 2026, it was 76,500 tons. On an annualized basis, the plants now consume 131,000 tons compared with 44,200 tons before the full-scale invasion, roughly three times as much.

Before the war, output was a trickle. In the second half of 2020, around 40,000 tons of recorded explosive materials left the plants, and imports were negligible. The Kazan gunpowder plant shipped just 146 tons in that half-year. Actual output is below 100 percent because some of the acid can be recovered. According to chemical experts we spoke with, around 90 percent is considered realistic under Russian conditions. That puts total production at no more than 90,000 tons of gunpowder and explosives during the period examined, or around 154,000 tons a year when annualized.

Solid rocket fuel is in a league of its own. Its oxidizer, ammonium perchlorate, is produced by only one plant in all of Russia, Anozit in Kuybyshev in the Novosibirsk region. In January 2026, only 4 substances arrived there in larger quantities. 2 of them were hydrochloric acid and ammonia. The other two were caustic soda and sodium chlorate. Anozit obtained the sodium chlorate, the starting point of the entire chain, from just one facility, the chlorine plant at the Ilim Group's pulp and paper mill in Bratsk. 1,600 tons of chlorate went there during the period examined. That turned a paper mill that normally bleaches pulp directly into a supplier for missiles.

Anozit produced 4,200 tons of ammonium perchlorate during those 7 months. Most of it, 3,300 tons, went to the Perm gunpowder plant, with the rest going to the Kamensky combine. From there, the trail leads to almost everything in Russia's arsenal that uses a solid-fuel motor.

The fuel is used in the 57E6E missile of the Pantsir-S1 air defense system and in weapons used by the Buk system. It powers the S-300 and the S-400. It is in the Iskander-M and the Kinzhal. The Oniks uses it too. And it reaches all the way to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Topol and Bulava are among them. So is Yars.

Where the tracks end, there are 4 types of railway stations. Those clearly identified as supplying the military handled 64,000 tons of explosives and ammunition. The largest volume arrives at Kavkaz station, from where ferries carry it to Crimea. The harder-to-identify stations nearly canceled each other out, with net turnover of around 1,000 tons.

The military depots, reliably identified through Google Maps, shipped 182,000 tons of ammunition and received 189,000 tons. Their surplus of 7,000 tons is small, but it at least points in one direction: the recorded stockpiles are growing. The mining industry received around 14,000 tons, barely more than in peacetime. Around 4,000 tons went to Belarus, while trade with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan effectively canceled itself out.

The picture drawn by the railcars cuts both ways. The major production chains for gunpowder and explosives do not depend on imports, but they do depend on a handful of plants that are close to monopolies. All nitric acid for the military plants comes from Novomoskovsk and Berezniki. TNT comes from 3 plants, and RDX now comes from 2. Since 2020, Russia has roughly tripled its explosives production. Further growth is probably being blocked mainly by production lines already running at full capacity, especially since much of the chemical equipment used to be imported. The plants were apparently operating far below their potential before the full-scale invasion, which is what made this leap possible in the first place. And even at this level of output, North Korea remains crucial. The 59,000 tons coming through the Far East roughly match the at least 64,000 tons recorded at stations near the front. It is precisely this supply that allows Moscow to refill its own depots.

The claim by Ukrainian intelligence that North Korea's stockpiles were exhausted and Russia had been left on its own does not match the situation. Supplies continued into the spring of 2026, moving from Nakhodka toward the war.

Both sides are now even fixing the weaknesses in their supply routes. The first road bridge between Russia and North Korea is expected to open in September. Until now, land traffic has depended on a single rail line where cargo sometimes has to be reloaded because of different standards, a bottleneck that trucks could bypass. What is officially meant to serve trade and travelers also opens another route for ammunition and military equipment.

Almost invisibly, the other part is growing inside the country itself. Satellite images show a new hall at a short-range missile plant near Hamhung that was built and then embedded into a hillside. Hwasong-11 family missiles are produced there, missiles Russia is already firing at Ukraine. Pyongyang is not simply emptying old stockpiles. It is building new production capacity and shielding it against airstrikes. Short-term weapons aid is turning into an arms axis built to last for years. Long before a shell hits the front, it is already sitting in a freight manifest.