Moscow Swaps Food For Weapons With North Korea – Analysis

By Kartik Bommakanti

Evidence has surfaced regarding the Russian Federation’s deal with North Korea or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that involves supplying food to Pyongyang in exchange for weapons. This deal has consequences beyond Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian Federation’s need for military assistance should not come as a surprise nor should North Korea’s bid for food. The latter has historically been a basket case, suffering a devastating famine in the 1990s and is an over-militarised state. Bartering weapons for food makes sense for the DPRK. The Russians, for their part, are left compelled to approach the North Koreans to replenish their depleting stocks of ordnance, which is an unsurprising development.

It is well-known and documented that Russia’s Wagner group of mercenaries secured military supplies from Pyongyang, with the latter supplying missiles and rockets for battlefield use. The Wagner group has been in the thick of hostilities in Ukraine, including at present in Bakhmut.

On the other hand, North Korean involvement in the supply is also a product of the Russian defence industry’s inability to meet the operational and supply requirements of Russian forces that are deployed for fighting in Ukraine. While this may indicate Russia’s desperation to sustain the fighting in the ongoing conflict against Ukraine, it nevertheless represents an ominous sign of things to come.

Firstly, the growth of Russia’s dependence on a state such as North Korea for its munition needs is only a symptom of the main problem. Moscow is now dependent on heavily and comprehensively sanctioned states such as the DPRK and Iran to meet, if not the full breadth of its military requirements, but to support its military effort against the Ukrainian forces.

It is devastatingly evident that the Russian defence industry cannot sustain the war effort against Ukraine on its own. Secondly, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as the closest great power ally that Russia has, one would assume that the PRC should be the principal supplier of Russia, but it is not. Rather, a combination of Western, especially American, pressure on Beijing to desist from extending military aid to Moscow and plausibly a shrewd calculation on the part of Beijing that avoids directly supplying Moscow has led to Pyongyang’s role as a munitions supplier.

The DPRK, which is the PRC’s proxy, is serving as a conduit for Beijing to keep Russia militarily supplied. Military supplies through Pyongyang give Beijing sufficient cover to not be directly involved in shoring up Russia’s war effort, obviating all the sanctions-related pressure that Beijing would otherwise be subjected to from the West. Beyond the machinations of Beijing and the Pyongyang-Moscow barter trade arrangement, which also includes cash, commercial aircraft, commodities, and raw material in exchange for Pyongyang’s supply of munitions, the Sino-Russian relationship in the context of India’s defence needs presents a minatory challenge.

Implications for India 

Russia’s inability to keep its own war effort well supplied represents a progressive enervation of the Russian military-industrial base. There is simply no surplus capacity left within the Russian military industry to keep India adequately supplied and even less so if war were to break out between India and China.

The bond between Russia and China as a result of the Ukraine crisis has also transmuted into Moscow’s deep dependence on China to service its economic needs. Moscow is also dependent on Beijing to secure optimum geopolitical support, or, at a minimum, to acquire covert and overt military aid through Chinese proxies such as the DPRK. This development only reinforces the need for India to move with greater urgency and vigour towards diversifying its military acquisitions away from Moscow.

If anything, the DPRK-Russia trade only underlines the indispensable requirement for New Delhi to free itself from Moscow’s stranglehold over its military needs. As a former Indian Foreign Secretary put it recently, Beijing’s capacity to exert pressure on Moscow against supplying India with military equipment, ammunition and spares to sustain the Indian armed services’ existing Russian-origin weapon systems is greater today.

Moving forward, New Delhi will need to blend measures such as sharper alignment with the United States (US), Western Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Australia and greater indigenous development of military equipment where feasible, if it is to arrest the adverse outcomes of its dependence on Russian military hardware. These efforts will need to be buttressed with other measures such as reverse engineering, which is by no means easy because it involves reconstructing and reproducing military technology.

The reverse engineering and manufacturing of components and spares of Russian-origin weapon systems and platforms in the inventory of the Indian armed services will require the government to rely on not just the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), its subsidiaries and Defence Public Sector Units (DPSUs) but equally on Indian private sector enterprises.

To be sure, some of this effort is already underway with the Hindustan Aeronautical Limited (HAL)’ Nashik plant completing Repair and Over Haul (ROH) for at least 20 Sukhoi-30 MKI aircraft in the Indian Air Force (IAF) fleet. Nevertheless, this is insufficient, because the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the three services still face the burden of contending with the limits on downstream supply from the Russian end. India also has to convey to the Kremlin that its efforts to source spares and supplies to ensure the upkeep and performance of its sizeable Russian-origin military inventory whether from external suppliers as well as native ones are simply the by-product of the Russian defence industry’s own incapacities and supply constraints.

About the author: Kartik Bommakanti is a Senior Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme. Kartik specialises in space military issues and his research is primarily centred on the Indo-Pacific region. He also works on emerging technologies as well as nuclear, conventional and sub-conventional coercion, particularly in the context of the Indian subcontinent and the role of great powers in the subcontinent’s strategic dynamics. He has published in peer reviewed journals.

Source: This article was published by Observer Research Foundation