Russia is believed to have supplied North Korea more than one million barrels of oil since March of this year, according to analysis of satellite images by the Open Source Centre, a UK-based non-profit research group. The oil is payment for the weapons and troops Pyongyang has sent to Moscow to fuel its war in Ukraine, leading experts and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy have told the BBC.
These otransport violates UN sanctions, which ban countries from selling oil to North Korea, except in small quantities, in an attempt to strangle its economy to prevent it from further developing nuclear weapons.
Satellite images, released exclusively to the BBC, show more than a dozen different North Korean oil tankers arriving at an oil terminal in Russia’s Far East a total of 43 times in the last eight months. Further pictures, taken from the ships at sea, appear to show the tankers arriving empty and leaving almost full.
North Korea is the only country in the world that it is not allowed to buy oil on the open market. The number of barrels of refined oil it can receive is limited by the United Nations to 500,000 per year, well below the amount it needs. The first oil shipment documented by the Open Source Center in a new report was on March 7, 2024, seven months after it was first revealed that the Pyongyang was sending weapons to Moscow.
The missions continued as thousands of North Korean troops were said to have been sent to Russia to fight, with the last recorded on November 5. “While Kim Jong Un provides Vladimir Putin with a lifeline to continue his war, Russia is quietly providing North Korea with a lifeline of its ownsays Joe Byrne of the Open Source Center.
“This steady flow of oil gives North Korea a level of stability that it hasn’t had since these sanctions were imposed.” Four former members of a UN committee responsible for monitoring sanctions on North Korea told the BBC that the transfers were a consequence of of growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.
“These transfers fuel Putin’s war machine – it’s oil for missiles, oil for artillery and now oil for soldiers,” says Hugh Griffiths, who led the commission from 2014 to 2019.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the BBC: “To continue fighting in Ukraine, Russia is increasingly dependent on North Korea for troops and weapons in exchange for oil.” He added that this “has immediate security impact on the Korean Peninsula, Europe and the Indo-Pacific».
Easy and cheap supply of oil
While most people in North Korea rely on coal for their daily lives, oil is essential for the operation of the country’s military. Diesel and gasoline are used to transport missile launchers and troops around the country, run munitions factories and fuel the cars of Pyongyang’s elite.
The 500,000 barrels North Korea is allowed to receive falls far short of the nine million it consumes – meaning that since the cap was introduced in 2017, the country forced to buy oil illegally from criminal networks to cover this deficit.
This involves moving the oil between ships at sea – a dangerous, expensive and time-consuming business, according to Dr Go Myong-hyun, a senior researcher at South Korea’s National Security Strategic Institute, which is linked to the country’s spy agency.
“Now kim jong un receives oil directlyit’s probably better quality and chances are he’s getting it for free, just like the ammo supply. What’s better than that?’ “One million barrels is nothing for a major oil producer like Russia, but it is a significant amount for North Korea,” adds Dr Go.
Monitoring of “silent” transfers
In all 43 of the voyages tracked by the Open Source Center using satellite imagery, the North Korean-flagged tankers arrived at the Russian port of Vostochny with their trackers off, obscuring their movements. The images show that they then returned to one of four ports on North Korea’s east and west coasts.
“Boats appear silently, almost every week”says Joe Byrne, the researcher from the Open Source Center. “Since March there has been a fairly steady flow.” The team, which has been tracking these tankers since the oil sanctions were first introduced, used its knowledge of each ship’s capacity to calculate how many barrels of oil it could carry.
They then studied images of ships entering and leaving Vostochny and, in most cases, could see how low they sat in the water and therefore how full they were. The tankers, they estimate, were loaded to 90% of their capacity. “We can see from some of the images that if the ships were fuller they would sink,” he says.
Based on this, they estimate that, since March, Russia has given North Korea more than a million barrels of oil – more than twice the annual cap, and about ten times the amount Moscow officially gave Pyongyang in 2023. This follows a US government estimate in May that Moscow had already supplied more than 500,000 barrels worth of oil.
A ‘new level of contempt’ for sanctions
These oil deliveries not only violate UN sanctions on North Korea, which Russia signed up to, as permanent member of the UN Security Council – but also, more than half of the voyages tracked by the Open Source Center were made by ships that have been individually approved by the UN. This means they should have been confiscated upon entering Russian waters.
The US and South Korea estimate that Pyongyang has sent 16,000 containers filled with shells and rockets to Moscow, while remnants of North Korean ballistic missiles have been recovered from the battlefield in Ukraine. More recently, Putin and Kim signed a defense pact, resulting in thousands of North Korean troops to be sent to the Kursk region of Russia, where intelligence reports indicate they are now in combat.
South Korea’s government told the BBC it would “sternly respond to Russia and North Korea’s violation of UN Security Council resolutions.” Its biggest concern is that Moscow will provide for Pyongyang technology to improve spy satellites and its ballistic missiles.
Last month, Seoul’s Defense Minister Kim Jong-hyun said there was a “high possibility” North Korea would seek such help. “If you send your people to die in a foreign war, a million barrels of oil is simply not sufficient rewardsays Dr. Goh.
Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea-Russia relations at Kumkin University in Seoul, agrees. “I used to think it was not in Russia’s interest to share military technology, but maybe its view has changed. The Russians need these troops and this gives the North Koreans more power».
