North Korea is sending more workers to Russia in 2026, but many recruits leave without knowing their destination or their jobs.
A posting to Russia once looked like a rare chance to earn money for many North Koreans. Plenty of them paid bribes to officials just to get their names on the dispatch list, but that outlook has shifted as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on into another year. More people now try to avoid the assignment, even as Pyongyang moves to expand its overseas labor program.
According to sources inside North Korea, the Workers’ Party of Korea ordered a recruitment drive for Russia in late February. State agencies then began tallying how many workers each of them would need to supply, with one source saying this year’s intake appears to be larger than last year’s.
Agencies are choosing workers without telling them the country, region or type of work awaiting them, the source said. Once an agency puts a name forward, refusing becomes all but impossible for the worker involved. At the same time, attitudes toward working in Russia are clearly changing inside the country.
“Before the war, people competed to go to Russia and even paid bribes under the table to get picked,” the source said. “But since news spread that a lot of soldiers had died, people are clearly more eager to avoid going.”
North Korea began sending thousands of troops to fight Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region in late 2024, and South Korean intelligence has since reported heavy casualties among those North Korean soldiers. Some North Koreans now obtain medical certificates from hospitals to get themselves out of the selection pool, according to the source.
The trend echoes a Daily NK report in July that Pyongyang residents had grown reluctant to volunteer for Russia. A source said at the time that news of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory had reached ordinary North Koreans, weakening the old willingness to spend money for a chance to work abroad. In the capital, stories from returning workers and outside information led more people to view the posting as dangerous.
“Fewer people treat a posting to Russia as a chance to earn money the way they used to,” the source said. “More of them now see it as a dangerous assignment, and that trend is especially strong in Pyongyang.”
Authorities are pressing ahead with recruitment regardless, drawing mainly on workers from factories and state enterprises. Coal miners, ore miners and farm workers are, in principle, exempt from this round of selection.
Once an agency recommends a worker for deployment, saying no is not a realistic option. “The system simply does not allow you to refuse,” the source told Daily NK. Work in Russia is shifting from a coveted chance to earn foreign currency into a form of state mobilization. The government now picks the people it needs and sends them abroad.
Lee Hwi Min heads RT SAVE, a group that has closely tracked the situation of North Korean laborers in Russia. He said North Korean deployments differ sharply from the voluntary jobs abroad that workers elsewhere choose for themselves.
“In North Korea, an ordinary person cannot simply go to Russia because they want to,” Lee said. “Some people prepare for years and must pass a state selection process for overseas workers. That process checks background records, past military service and a range of other requirements. They also have to fit whatever policy guidelines the authorities issue at the time before officials finally approve them.”
Workers to Russia told only “Siberia or the Far East”
What stands out most about the latest deployments is how little information the workers receive before they leave. Recruiters tell them only that they are headed to “Siberia or the Russian Far East” and nothing more specific. Even the officials handling recruitment sometimes do not know the final destination, the source said.
The people escorting the workers face much the same situation on the journey. They get orders to travel through Khasan, the Russian border town across the Tumen River, to the Khabarovsk area. Only after they arrive do they learn where to take the workers next.
“In some cases it takes more than 15 days to reach the final worksite,” the source said. “When workers leave the country, it is hard for them to know where they will be or what they will do.”
This goes well beyond a simple inconvenience for the workers involved. When they set off without knowing their worksite, their duties or the risks, meaningful voluntary consent hardly exists.
Russia today is also a very different place than it was before the war began. The long conflict, military mobilization and an exodus of working-age men have left the country with a severe labor shortage. Russian officials and companies are now actively searching for new sources of foreign labor, with some reports putting the number of unfilled jobs in Russia at roughly 2.3 million.
That is where the interests of Pyongyang and Moscow line up neatly. North Korea gains a steady source of foreign currency, and Russia secures an organized supply of construction and factory labor.
The Korea Institute for National Unification, in a 2025 report, warned that North Korean labor exports could shift from China toward Russia because of the war. The report described Russia as an emerging hub for North Korean overseas workers. That trend may also fit Pyongyang’s strategy of reducing its economic dependence on Beijing.
What sets Russia apart from other destinations is the blurring line between civilian labor and military cooperation. In August, Daily NK reported that North Korea was expanding its overseas labor programs on a country-by-country basis. For Russia, it appears to manage military and special-agency engineering crews separately from ordinary construction workers.
The Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team said in a 2025 report that North Korea had asked Russia for 8,000 worker visas in 2024. It added that 481 workers may have reached Russia between December 2024 and February 2025. They included 198 construction workers and 283 textile workers, and North Korea planned to send thousands more into construction and forestry. South Korea, the United States, Japan and eight other countries formed the monitoring team in October 2024. It took over the job of tracking sanctions violations after Russia vetoed the U.N. panel of experts.
A separate institute report examined why Russia seems to prefer North Korean soldier-workers on its building sites. It pointed to signs that North Korean troops have joined Russian construction and reconstruction projects since the countries’ 2024 alliance treaty. Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin signed that Comprehensive Strategic Partnership treaty in Pyongyang in June 2024, and it includes a mutual defense clause. The institute called the arrangement a new model that fuses the North Korean military’s economic role with the Russia-North Korea alliance.
It may be that “overseas workers” no longer describes everyone North Korea sends to Russia. Factory laborers, construction crews, military engineers and special-agency personnel now arrive through separate channels. Tracking the system means working out who is a laborer, who is a soldier, and where the wages finally go.
The growing demand for manpower also appears to be changing how North Korea selects workers for overseas jobs. In the past, officials strictly screened each candidate’s family ties and political background before approving any posting abroad. Having a defector among one’s relatives was often enough to rule someone out entirely.
Background checks for ordinary workers bound for Russia have recently become less extensive, according to the source. A relative who defected is also less often grounds for automatic exclusion than it once was. Managers who need more freedom of movement abroad still face rigorous vetting that reaches as far as second cousins.
None of this means the state has given up on controlling these workers. Instead, it may be lowering some hurdles at the selection stage to secure the numbers it needs. The focus of control would then shift to how managers handle workers once they reach Russia.
In fact, authorities have tightened oversight of the contracts that underpin overseas deployments in recent months. Daily NK reported on Sept. 2 that North Korea now requires overseas business entities to submit contracts stamped by their foreign partners. The state then grants deployment rights to those entities on the strength of that paperwork. Rules for choosing people are loosening, while state control over the deals and their profits grows tighter.
North Korea is also reviewing low-margin labor contracts and plans to send workers only to the most lucrative projects. The authorities appear far more focused on how much hard currency a contract brings in than on worker safety and fair pay.
U.N. Security Council Resolutions 2375 and 2397, both adopted in 2017, bar new work permits for North Korean nationals. They also required member states to send North Korean workers home by the end of 2019. Yet as Pyongyang and Moscow have grown into military and economic allies, Russia has become a leading market for North Korean labor despite those U.N. sanctions.
More troubling still, workers are losing the ability to make choices for themselves throughout the process. They do not know which country, which region or which job awaits them when they set out. Even workers who fear the war can hardly refuse once an agency selects them. After arriving, they fall back under the control of North Korean agencies and their managers on site.
Critics argue that the plight of North Korean workers in Russia goes beyond withheld wages and poor housing. They say the right to weigh the risks, the right to know one’s job and the right to refuse unwanted labor may already be gone before departure.
With Russia short of workers because of the war and Pyongyang hungry for cash, the two governments’ interests are converging. Meanwhile, the choices open to ordinary North Koreans increasingly depend on how much information they can access.
“Pyongyang residents and people with overseas experience can at least find out which companies pay well and which postings are safer,” Lee said. “They try to time their deployment accordingly, but ordinary people and first-time recruits struggle to learn much about Russia.”
“North Korean society restricts access to outside information, so new recruits have little to go on,” Lee added. “People who have never been abroad still hope to see a foreign country and earn more money, so some may still want to go to Russia.”
About This Translation
This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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