Modern slaves! Thousands of North Koreans sent to work in Russia

Thousands of North Koreans are being sent to work in slave conditions in Russia to fill a huge labor shortage exacerbated by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the BBC reports, quoted by Focus.

Moscow has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang for help in the war, using its missiles, artillery shells and soldiers.

Now that many Russians have been killed, on the battlefield or fled the country, Moscow is increasingly having difficulty finding workers.

In an interview with the BBC, North Korean workers who fled Russia talk about the harsh working conditions. The North Korean authorities have tightened their control over them to prevent them from escaping Russia.

One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in the Russian Far East, he was escorted from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything.

“The outside world is our enemy,” the agent told him. He was sent straight to work to build high-rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day, he claims.

The construction workers' workday starts at 6am and ends at 2am. “The conditions are really terrible,” said Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea's Dong-A University who has traveled to Russia many times to interview North Korean workers.

“The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night, the lights are turned off and they work in the dark, with little protection.”

The defectors say the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's State Security Department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers infested with bugs, or on the floors of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarpaulins pulled over door frames to try to keep them out of the cold.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans have worked in Russia in the past, earning millions of pounds a year for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his financially strapped regime. Then, in 2019, the UN banned countries from using these workers in an attempt to cut off funding to Kim and stop him from building nuclear weapons, meaning most of them were sent home.

Russian government data shows that more than 13,000 North Koreans entered the country in 2024, a 12-fold increase from the previous year. Nearly 8,000 of them entered on student visas, but according to an intelligence official and experts, this is a tactic used by Russia to circumvent the UN ban.

In June, senior Russian official Sergei Shoigu acknowledged for the first time that 5,000 North Koreans would be sent to rebuild Kursk, a Russian region captured by Ukrainian forces last year but now back in Russian hands.