North Korea’s deepening military alliance with Russia should worry China

As ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine stall, another troubling front is quietly expanding in Northeast Asia. North Korea has already deployed thousands of troops to support Russian forces in Ukraine – building on deployments from last year – and more could be on the way.

This deepening military alliance, cemented under a revived defence pact, is less about fighting a shared war than about regime survival, strategic leverage and long-term disruption of the regional balance. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, the geopolitical consequences are becoming even more unpredictable.

North Korea’s strategic alignment with Russia is neither a recent development nor merely about survival under pressure. From its founding through the Korean war, Pyongyang functioned as a Soviet proxy under Stalin’s guidance. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, North Korea embraced self-reliance and isolation but never abandoned the strategy of leveraging great power dynamics to ensure regime continuity.

Its nuclear weapons programme has been central to this balancing act, allowing Pyongyang to extract diplomatic and economic concessions. Today, that same logic is driving its deepening military cooperation with Moscow, suggesting the fallout from the Ukraine war could reach far beyond Europe and reshape Northeast Asia’s strategic environment.

Russia has embraced deeper cooperation with North Korea, most notably through a party-to-party agreement signed in February. The accord emphasised the “preservation of historical memory”, evoking Cold War symbolism and renewed ideological closeness.

This effort to revive a suzerain-client dynamic suggests Moscow sees value in drawing Pyongyang further into its orbit, both to offset its global isolation and to leverage North Korea as a partner in confronting shared adversaries. However, the alliance could backfire. If Russia hopes to rejoin the international community, its close ties with a pariah state like North Korea could become a serious liability.

  

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