Originally published 2022-07-25.
In July 2022, about five months into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow's ambassador in Pyongyang floated an unusual idea: North Korean construction crews could be brought in to rebuild the war-damaged Donbas once the fighting stopped. It was a proposal, not a signed programme, but it said a great deal about where Russia was looking for partners and about how North Korea earns hard currency.
Three years later the relationship had moved far beyond builders. North Korea sent soldiers to fight for Russia in 2024, and in 2025 Moscow announced that thousands of North Korean workers would help clear and rebuild the Russian border region of Kursk. Here is what was said in 2022, why it mattered, and what came next.
What the Russian ambassador proposed
Alexander Matsegora, Russia's ambassador to North Korea, raised the idea in an interview with the pro-Kremlin daily Izvestia published on 19 July 2022. He described North Korean builders as highly skilled and willing to work in harsh conditions, and said they could help restore housing, infrastructure and industry in the Donbas. In his words, they could help restore "social, infrastructure and industrial facilities".
He blamed the destruction on retreating Ukrainian forces, whom he labelled neo-Nazis, a Kremlin talking point built on the false claim that Ukraine's elected government is run by Nazis. In reality, much of the destruction in cities such as Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk was caused by months of Russian shelling and air strikes during the battles to capture them.
Matsegora also sketched out trade plans. According to the Moscow Times summary of the interview, North Korea wanted spare parts for Soviet-era industrial equipment, much of which had originally been made in eastern Ukraine, and could supply magnesite clinker in exchange for coking coal and wheat.
Why North Korea, and why the Donbas
The Donbas is the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Parts of it had been held by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, who declared two "people's republics" that almost no country recognised. In February 2022 Russia recognised them, and in September 2022 it went further and claimed to annex them, a move rejected by Ukraine and condemned by most UN member states.
In early July 2022 North Korea became only the third state, after Russia and Syria, to recognise the two republics. Ukraine cut diplomatic ties with Pyongyang in response and said Moscow's appeal to North Korea said more about how toxic Russia had become than about Pyongyang. Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed leader in Donetsk, called the recognition a triumph of diplomacy and said he hoped for active cooperation.
For Russia, the recognition offered a rare diplomatic endorsement at a time when it was heavily sanctioned. For North Korea, already cut off by years of UN sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, Russia was a powerful partner with oil, grain and technology to offer.
How Ukraine and the US responded
Ukrainian officials treated the proposal as evidence of Russian isolation. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba argued that Moscow now had to turn to the most isolated regimes because it had "no more allies in the world, except for countries that depend on it financially and politically."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price said decisions about Ukrainian territory belonged to Ukraine and described the suggestion as "an affront to the sovereignty" of Kyiv. Pyongyang, for its part, insisted that Ukraine had no standing to object to its recognition of the republics and accused Kyiv of siding with what it called hostile US policy.
North Korea's overseas labour system
The idea of sending North Korean crews abroad was not new. For decades the North Korean state has hired out workers to foreign employers in construction, logging, fishing, textiles and, more recently, IT. Russia, especially its Far East, and China have been the biggest destinations, with smaller numbers reported in the Middle East and parts of Africa.
Human rights groups and UN investigators have documented long hours, close surveillance by minders, restrictions on movement and the confiscation of most of the workers' pay by the state. That is why the scheme is often described as forced or slave-like labour. The US Treasury has described North Korea's overseas workers, including IT workers, as a critical stream of revenue for its weapons programmes.
In December 2017 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2397, which required member states to send home North Korean nationals earning income abroad within 24 months, with limited exceptions. Russia voted for that resolution. Any official plan to employ North Korean labourers in Russian-held territory would therefore have clashed directly with sanctions Moscow itself had approved.
From builders to soldiers: what happened next
There is little public evidence that large North Korean construction crews were deployed in the occupied Donbas in 2022 or 2023. Instead, cooperation between the two countries deepened in other ways. In 2024 Russia and North Korea signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that commits each side to military assistance if the other is attacked; Russia's upper house approved it on 6 November 2024.
By then North Korean troops were already in Russia. Ukrainian military intelligence said the first soldiers arrived in Russia's Kursk region on 25 October 2024, and the US Defense Department put the number there at about 10,000 by the end of that month. Later estimates ranged higher. The troops first clashed with Ukrainian forces in early November 2024, and in January 2025 Ukraine captured two wounded North Korean soldiers, the first taken as prisoners of war. Western and South Korean estimates of North Korean casualties ran into the thousands.
After months of denials, Russia's chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov acknowledged the deployment on 26 April 2025, and North Korea confirmed it two days later. Vladimir Putin praised the soldiers, and Kim Jong Un announced a monument to the Kursk operation in Pyongyang.
The labour idea returns, in Kursk
The 2022 proposal effectively came back in a new form. In June 2025 Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia's Security Council, announced that 1,000 North Korean military personnel would be sent to Kursk to clear mines and 5,000 military construction workers to help rebuild damaged infrastructure. That was Russian territory rather than occupied Ukraine, but the logic was the same one Matsegora had described: North Korean labour in exchange for Russian support.
Civilian workers were reportedly arriving too. The BBC reported that more than 10,000 North Korean workers were sent to Russia in 2024 for construction and other jobs, in breach of UN sanctions, and a South Korean official said up to 50,000 were expected in 2025. These figures come from intelligence and media reporting and are hard to verify independently.
Why it matters
The July 2022 interview looked at first like a provocative aside. In hindsight it was an early sign of a partnership in which North Korea supplies people, shells and missiles, and Russia supplies money, food, energy and possibly military technology. For North Korea that means a way around sanctions. For the workers themselves, the conditions human rights groups have described for years are unlikely to have changed. And for Ukraine, the question of who rebuilds the Donbas, and under whose flag, remains bound up with how the war ends.
Sources: The Moscow Times, 19 July 2022; Stars and Stripes / AP, 21 July 2022; Wikipedia: UN Security Council Resolution 2397; Wikipedia: North Korean involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
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