Kim Jong Un’s New-Year Letter Frames North Korean Combat Losses in Ukraine as Proof of an Unbreakable DPRK–Russia Alliance

Major powers enlisting smaller allies’ manpower is hardly new: during the Korean War (1950-53) China’s ‘People’s Volunteers’ lost hundreds of thousands fighting for Pyongyang, while North Korean pilots quietly flew for Egypt and Vietnam in the 1960s-70s. Today’s twist is a sanctioned, impoverished DPRK sending soldiers and shells to a sanctioned, resource-rich Russia—each bartering what the other lacks. The exchange mirrors Cold-War client-state patterns but underlines a post-unipolar trend toward hard sanctions blocs trading outside Western systems. If the partnership endures, it could loosen the effectiveness of sanctions regimes and normalize proxy deployments once thought too politically costly. A century from now the episode may be viewed not for its battlefield impact—North Korean numbers are modest relative to Russian forces—but as an early marker of a tighter Moscow-Pyongyang (and perhaps Beijing-Tehran) security corridor reshaping Eurasian power balances after the 2022 Ukraine invasion.