Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, has emerged from the post-pandemic period with a stronger strategic position than in previous years. His country is now a de facto nuclear power, its economy is growing at its fastest pace in years, and he has been courted by the leaders of China, Russia and the United States. But behind that apparent resurgence lies a less visible reality: a state economic system that relies heavily on extracting labour and revenue from North Koreans at home and abroad.
By supplying troops and ammunition for Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kim is estimated to be reaping billions of dollars. In return, Russia is providing Pyongyang with advanced military technology and critical commodities including flour, pork and oil, goods that the regime can resell domestically for profit.
The human cost is borne by North Koreans. Thousands of soldiers have been killed or wounded on distant battlefields, while thousands more work behind the front lines in military drone factories, damaged cities and construction sites across Russia. Many enter Russia on student visas but never see a classroom, instead sleeping in shipping containers and working shifts lasting as long as 14 hours, with hardly any days off.
These findings were reported by The New York Times after its journalists spoke with dozens of North Korean defectors, human rights investigators and geopolitical analysts. The accounts describe a system in which state revenue quotas reach deep into civilian life, military institutions and overseas labour networks.
Closer to home, China is openly importing North Korean coal despite United Nations sanctions, according to satellite imagery cited in the reporting. Defectors say the coal is mined by workers trapped in forced labour in central and northern North Korea.
Even North Korea’s largest official export, hair products such as wigs and false eyelashes, carries allegations of severe exploitation. Much of the merchandise is produced in labour camps, where inmates are forced to meet daily quotas and, survivors say, risk starvation when they fail. Chinese customs data showed that North Korea made $188 million in sales of such products to China in 2024 alone.
On paper, North Korea is a socialist state in which citizens are provided with goods and services. In practice, defectors describe an economy organised around compulsory quotas, with citizens required to contribute to a shadow economy that supports the regime’s military ambitions and the lifestyle of its leadership.
“North Korea claims to be a tax-free country where everything is free,” said Ryu Hyeon-woo, who was North Korea’s acting ambassador to Kuwait when he defected. “In reality, its system survives by milking its people.”
North Korea’s economy has grown by more than 3% in each of the past three years, according to South Korea’s central bank, reversing the contraction experienced during the pandemic. The apparent recovery, however, has been accompanied by an extensive system of labour extraction.
At the Chongori labour camp in north-east North Korea, Baek Hye-ok said more than 100 women were held in a cell no larger than a two-car garage. Work began at dawn, with young women stitching wigs and false eyelashes. Trucks delivered raw materials labelled in Chinese and left with finished products. Prison officials told inmates that the goods were sent to China through the nearby city of Rason.
Baek recalled that meeting production quotas was a matter of survival.
“Your life depended on meeting your quota,” she said. “Fail, and you were beaten and your ration cut.”
During separate interviews, Baek and another former inmate, Lee Young-ju, said roughly one in every 10 inmates died each year. New prisoners quickly replaced them. Some had been caught foraging for food across the border in China, while others were being punished for watching smuggled South Korean dramas. Lee spent three years at the camp and Baek spent two years there over two separate periods.
“The place was a living hell,” Lee said.
The system described by defectors extends far beyond labour camps. Villagers collect berries for export to China. Schoolchildren supply rabbit hides for soldiers’ gloves. Tractor factories maintain production lines capable of manufacturing both agricultural machinery and tanks. The country’s 1.3-million-strong army, one of the world’s largest, is also used as a source of labour, with soldiers dispatched to construction projects.
The regime’s pursuit of foreign currency also reaches into its diplomatic and intelligence networks. Ryu said diplomats have smuggled Cuban cigars and African rhino horns in diplomatic pouches to raise “loyalty funds” for Kim or finance the preferences of his family, including Russian king crab, Arabian sweets and gold-tipped Montblanc pens.
North Korea’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance, its main intelligence agency, has also operated businesses abroad, Ryu said. At one point, he said, it ran restaurants and a group of 19 hackers and IT workers in the United Arab Emirates, where they stole cryptocurrency or used stolen identities to obtain freelance coding work.
Young North Koreans gifted in mathematics and science are selected and trained from an early age to become software engineers or hackers. They are subsequently deployed to countries including China, Russia and those in the Middle East, where they generate revenue for the regime while living in monitored dormitories.
In the first four months of this year alone, such North Korean operations accounted for 76% of all cryptocurrency stolen worldwide, according to TRM Labs, an analytics company. A North Korean banking operative named Sim Hyon Sop has been identified as central to laundering earnings generated by workers in the Middle East. The money-laundering network based in the UAE and involving Sim and Chinese partners has also been cited in US court documents and a Treasury Department sanctions report.
The country’s mines provide another source of revenue. Son Myong-hwa said her father worked underground in iron ore mines until lung disease claimed his life at 59. When she delivered lunchboxes, she recalled that the miners were so covered in dust that “only their eyes and teeth flashed white when they smiled”.
Jeong Sun-nam, whose father and siblings also worked mainly in iron ore mines, said her father survived three underground explosions. After blasts destroyed mine shafts, miners’ wives clawed through rubble with their bare hands until their fingers bled.
“Minerals from North Korea are stained with blood,” Jeong said.
Coal and iron ore have long been important sources of income for North Korea, despite United Nations sanctions imposed to restrict the trade. The reporting described a system of smuggling in which ships disable tracking transponders and transfer illicit cargo at sea. Satellite imagery analysed by the London-based Open Source Center identified six repeat offenders transporting North Korean coal and iron ore to Chinese ports.
The enforcement system itself has weakened. Russia and China dismantled the United Nations panel monitoring sanctions enforcement in 2024. A July report by the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a Seoul-based nonprofit, found that visits by large cargo ships to Nampo, North Korea’s principal coal and oil terminal, had increased fivefold since 2019. Blacklisted vessels, the report said, were no longer necessarily operating covertly but were docking “openly” at Chinese terminals.
The same pattern extends into Russia’s labour market. Lee Eun-pyong, a former North Korean soldier, said he was sent to Russia in 2017 to earn money for the regime. He and 33 comrades were described as “forefront warriors of the country’s nuclear power buildup”.
His working day began at 7 a.m. and continued past midnight. He slept on dusty floors or inside shipping containers and was required to generate $600 a month. Although officially enrolled at the European Institute Justo in Moscow, he was employed laying bricks, producing concrete slabs and plastering walls.
“We didn’t even know where the school was,” he recalled.
An estimated 100,000 North Korean workers remain in China despite a 2019 United Nations repatriation deadline. Russia issued more than 36,000 entry visas to North Koreans last year, four times the figure recorded in 2024, with nearly all issued for education, according to Russian government data.
North Korean workers are now openly advertised by Russian staffing agencies for employment in textile mills, restaurants and farms. An investigation by the Dutch nonprofit Global Rights Compliance found that workers in Russia averaged 14-hour days, with some receiving only two days off a year.
The final cost is being paid not only by workers but by soldiers sent into combat. Last year, Ukrainian troops found a dead North Korean officer in Russia’s Kursk region. Documents recovered from his body described the conditions faced by an estimated 16,000 North Korean troops dispatched to Russia. South Korean intelligence estimates that as many as 2,000 have been killed.
The documents, obtained by the Human Rights Foundation, described North Korean troops facing “a barrage of enemy artillery fire and suicide drones swarming in like a cloud of hornets”. Russian evacuation vehicles routinely took more than 10 hours to reach wounded soldiers, with one document stating: “Because of the failure to evacuate the wounded in time, combatants were sacrificed during the evacuation.”
The account contrasted sharply with North Korea’s official portrayal of its fallen soldiers as martyrs who willingly chose death rather than capture.
The diary of one fallen platoon leader offered a more personal account. Recovered by Ukrainian special forces and reviewed by a Human Rights Foundation staff member who was a North Korean defector, it described the soldier’s conflict between his duty to demonstrate “unparalleled bravery in battles” for “the greatest joy and satisfaction to the homeland and the party” and his private fear that his actions would cost his men their lives.
In December 2024, he wrote a final prayer for comrades who had died. That same month, he wrote to his “princess” in North Korea, leaving a promise in case he did not return.
“If I died,” he wrote, “I will become a butterfly and find you.”
The contrast between North Korea’s expanding strategic power and the experiences described by its workers, prisoners, miners and soldiers forms the central tension in the account reported by The New York Times. The country’s economic growth, expanding military capabilities and deepening relationships with Russia and China have created new resources for Kim Jong Un’s government. But the testimonies of defectors and evidence gathered by investigators show that a substantial part of those resources is generated through systems in which the costs are borne by people with little power to refuse.
