SEOUL — North Korea has found the perfect market for one of the few products that its dilapidated factories are capable of manufacturing at high enough quality for export. The market is Russia and the product is artillery shells, which Russia needs for what has become a long-running, enervating war to take over Ukraine.

Can missiles be far behind?

Russia “continues to suffer from severe shortages in Ukraine,” according to an anonymous intel official in Washington quoted by the Associated Press, and North Korea’s economy is descending to the lower depths while the North suffers under sanctions and the effects of Covid.

Just as the North’s impending deal with Russia was being disclosed in Washington, the Bank of Korea in South Korea came out with a devastating report on how low the North’s economy is sinking.

The South’s central bank said North Korea’s gross domestic product had decreased by an average of 2.4 percent a year for the past five years while its exports totaled a puny $710 million last year, the lowest since 1955. The North Korean economy, the bank said, “has become completely isolated from the international community.”

Even as it seemed North Korea’s economy could sink no lower, along came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The speed with which North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, threw his support behind the invasion, joining Syria in recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as independent countries after they were overrun by the Russians, showed his desperation for a new comrade in arms.

Mr. Kim refused to support a UN resolution condemning the invasion. Meantime, North Korea’s industry has been struggling for many years even as the North has been building nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction plus the missiles for sending them to distant targets. 

One area in which the industry can be sure of total government support, including the de facto slave labor needed to keep it humming, is the manufacture of artillery weapons and shells, and also the bullets needed for rifles, machine guns, and much else for the North’s 1.2 million troops.  Soldiers are dragooned to work in the factories just as they are forced to work on farms and other non-military projects for next-to-nothing wages.

With thousands of artillery pieces zeroed in on South Korean targets from immediately above the demilitarized zone between the two countries, North Korea has maintained a credible threat against the South ever since the Korean War ended in a truce in 1953. There is no doubt the North would love to promote arms sales to foreign clients in need of a steady flow of ammunition.

The North, however, has encountered hassles in exporting arms thanks to sanctions imposed by Washington and the United Nations in response to the North’s six nuclear tests and tests of long-range missiles, and Russia theoretically has pledged to abide by those sanctions.

Forget, however, about Russia’s dedication to sanctions, which are all the more important as the North prepares for a seventh nuclear test. 

The strictures of sanctions are not a consideration for President Putin as he searches for ways to keep his forces armed for what promises to be a long-range struggle that’s already costing him dearly. North Korean arms and weapons would move into Russia by rail from the North across the Tumen River. From there they would go by the trans-Siberian railroad into the heart of Russia.

That Russia has to turn to North Korea for arms and ammunition that it should be making in sufficient quantities for itself should be seen as rank humiliation for a nation that originally designed most of the weapons that North Korea manufactures.

Word of the arms sale follows reports that North Korea may be sending  more workers to Russia, as it has often done in the past. There were even reports that North Korean soldiers might be going to join Russia’s depleted, demoralized forces in Ukraine.

North Korea, however, is far more likely to send workers than soldiers. It’s already sent thousands of workers to Russia and many more to a dozen other foreign countries. They labor under tight supervision, barred from mixing with the local populace and confined at night to dormitories under strict guard. Most of the payroll goes into North Korean government coffers, but enough reaches their families to motivate them to compete for jobs abroad.

North Koreans, however, might not be such a good source as replacement for Russian troops. Most of them, while given what they need to survive, still are not in great physical shape. Many are short and underweight, having not been fed enough as children.

Worst of all, however, some North Korean soldiers would be only too eager to surrender to Ukrainian forces — a great way to defect while being counted as “missing” or even as “prisoners of war.”