Putin paid Kim Jong Un for sending troops and weapons to Russia – The New York Times

According to the agency, sending troops brings North Korea various benefits, including much-needed money and diplomatic leverage. Kim Jong Un receives food, oil, cash, and modern weapons systems worth billions of dollars from Russia. This is likely to allow his regime to withstand international sanctions and modernize its conventional armed forces.

In June, Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense and cooperation agreement in Pyongyang. After that, North Korea began sending troops to Russia.

According to the NYT, North Korea has provided Russia with weapons in 20,000 shipping containers. These include millions of artillery shells, newly developed ballistic missiles, multiple-launch rocket systems, and long-range howitzers.

North Korea may have earned up to $5.5 billion from arms deals with Russia. The DPRK can also receive up to $572 million annually through the deployment of troops. At the same time, the country's official exports amounted to $330 million last year alone.

However, neither Russia nor North Korea has disclosed how Moscow paid the DPRK.

Moreover, satellite imagery revealed that North Korean oil tankers are transporting far more oil from Russia than permitted under UN sanctions, according to an analysis by the British Open Source Center and the BBC.

On the ground, the North Korean military is also gaining valuable information from the battlefield for the first time in decades, including innovations in the use of drones that are changing modern warfare. The war against Ukraine provides North Korea with its first opportunity to test its latest KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles against Western air defense systems in real combat. According to South Korean officials, their technicians traveled with the missiles to identify flaws and collect data to take home.

North Korean military in the Kursk region

According to the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, Russia has begun using North Korean soldiers.

Read about Zelenskyy's comments on the use of North Korean troops in the assaults in the material by RBC-Ukraine.