Last year, Kim Jong Un received six times more income from abroad than the year before the war in Ukraine – 8.38 billion US dollars.
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22 billion US dollars in 4 years
In total, since 2022 he has managed to earn 22 billion US dollars – this was shown by an analysis of government, trade, and intelligence data conducted by Bloomberg Economics and a study of major North Korean currency sources. This is almost four times more than in the previous four-year period, when the US convinced Russia and China to agree to sanctions against North Korea to cut it off from currency inflows needed to develop its nuclear program.
It was precisely from 2022 that Kim Jong Un began to profit from arms sales, supporting Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. For helping his “dear friend,” Kim Jong Un, according to Bloomberg’s estimate, received a total of 14.02 billion US dollars from Russia over four years, including 849 million for the “export” of soldiers.
Also “exported” workers
Income from the “export” of North Korean workers also increased – they began to be sent to Russia, among other things, to “compensate” for tightened migration policies towards residents of Central Asian countries.
According to assessments by South Korean, Ukrainian, and Western special services, Kim Jong Un transferred about 10–12 thousand soldiers to V. Putin. About 2,300 of them died in the Kursk region, and total losses (dead and wounded), according to South Korean intelligence data, amounted to about 6 thousand people in 2024–2025.
Besides sending soldiers, North Korea also supplied V. Putin’s army with 5–6 million units of artillery and mortar ammunition, said retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, current senior director of the Cybersecurity and Technological Innovation Center and senior fellow at the Defense of Democracies Foundation.
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“This is more than the entire NATO alliance has produced over the past few decades,” he noted.
North Korean ballistic missiles for Russia
Moreover, from the end of 2023 to August 2025, North Korea transferred 150 KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles to Russia, Ukrainian military intelligence representative Andriy Cherniak told Reuters. According to him, after a year-long break, Russia began using them again after receiving a shipment of 40 units.
The new batch may total 120 missiles, and a North Korean missile unit is being formed in the Voronezh region, writes The Moscow Times.
By starting to sell weapons to Russia, North Korea “seems to have won the lottery,” and the renewed Chinese support in recent years can be considered equivalent to a stable “pension,” says one of the world’s leading North Korea experts, director of the consulting company Korea Risk Group, Andrei Lankov: “North Korea’s situation is now the strongest it has been in the past 35 years.”
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