Thousands of North Koreans are reportedly being sent to Russia to work in brutal conditions to offset a severe labour shortage caused by the war in Ukraine.
The shortage stems from Russia’s battlefield losses, mass military mobilisation and an exodus of workers abroad since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade their European neighbour.
Moscow has already relied on Pyongyang for weapons and ammunition, but is now turning to North Korean manpower for construction, manufacturing and technology work, despite a 2019 United Nations ban on such labour.
A number of North Korean workers have spoken to BBC News to describe horrific conditions on Russian work sites, where they say they are forced to do 18-hour shifts while under round-the-clock surveillance and paid only a fraction of what people from other countries earn.
North Korea has been a staunch ally of Russia throughout its invasion of Ukraine, to the point of providing North Korea troops to help repel a Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast last year.
But beyond a limited military role, North Korea has also offered to help prop up Russia’s struggling wartime economy. On a visit to Pyongyang in June, Putin’s security adviser Sergei Shoigu announced that North Korea would send 5,000 construction workers to help rebuild damaged infrastructure in Kursk.
South Korean intelligence officials told the BBC that in reality this figure was half the number already sent by Pyongyang to work on projects across Russia, and that the total number could reach 50,000. This is despite a UN ban on other countries accepting North Korean labourers, put in place because Kim Jong Un’s regime uses the funds earned to further its nuclear weapons programme.
Labourers who managed to escape worksites in Russia told the broadcaster that they fled fearing their lives, leaving behind “abysmal” conditions working shifts from 6am to 2am the following night, with just two days off a year.
One construction worker said he was taken from the airport in Russia’s Far East directly to a building site by a North Korean security agent, who told him: “The outside world is our enemy.”
Another defector said his hands would seize up each morning from exhaustion. “Waking up was terrifying, realising you had to repeat the same day over again,” he told the broadcaster.
And a third labourer recalled workers being beaten if caught resting, saying of the experience as a whole: “It was truly like we were dying.”
Labourers reported living in bug-infested shipping containers or unfinished flats without heating. Injuries often went untreated, and movement outside worksites was tightly controlled.
The UN banned countries taking such workers from North Korea in part because the majority of their wages are seized by the North Korean state as “loyalty fees”. Workers told the BBC that the remainder they were owed – usually $100-$200 (£74-£149) a month – was being withheld by managers until workers returned home, a policy designed to deter an increasing number of escapes in Russia.
The defectors, who were able to speak out after fleeing their overseers, said they earned five times less than other foreign workers for much heavier workloads.
Such accounts are rare and only likely to become more so – the South Korean government says the number of defections from Russia has halved since 2022 as surveillance measures designed to keep the workers on sites become ever tighter.
