North Koreans tell the BBC that they have been sent to work “like slaves” in Russia

Thousands of North Koreans are being sent to work in slavery in Russia to fill a huge shortage of labor, exacerbated by the ongoing invasion of Russia in Ukraine, the BBC has learned.

Moscow has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang to help him fight war, using her missiles, artillery shells and her soldiers.

Now that many of the men of Russia have either killed or have been bonded with battles – or have fled the country – intelligence staff have told the BBC that Moscow is increasingly relied on by workers in North Korea.

We have questioned six workers in North Korea who fled Russia since the beginning of the war, along with government officials, researchers and those who help save workers.

They detail how men are subjected to “hassle -free” working conditions and how the North Korean authorities tighten their control over workers to stop them from escaping.

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

“The outside world is our enemy,” the agent told him. He was put directly to work, building high quality apartments for more than 18 hours a day, he said.

All the six workers we talked to described the same penal working days-waking up at 6 o’clock in the morning and were forced to build apartments with high power until 2 in the morning the next morning, only two days off the year.

We changed their names to protect them.

“The awakening was horrifying, realizing that you should repeat the same day again,” said another construction worker, Tae, who managed to escape from Russia last year. Tae recalled how his hands would take over in the morning, unable to open, paralyzed by the work of the previous day.

“Some people would leave their post to sleep during the day, or fall asleep, but the supervisors would find and beat them. It was really like dying,” said another of the workers, Chan.

“The conditions are really inattentive,” says Kang Dong-Wan, a professor at the University of South Korea at the University who has traveled to Russia many times to interview workers in North Korea.

“Workers are exposed to many dangerous situations. At night the lights are exerted and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment.”

The escapes told us that workers were limited to their construction sites day and night, where they were observed by agents from the North Korean State Security Division. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded delivery containers, infected with bugs or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarpaulins pulled over the door to try to keep the cold.

A worker, Nam, said he once fell four meters from his construction site and “broke” his face, leaving him unable to work. Even then, his leaders would not let him leave the place to visit a hospital.

In the past, tens of thousands of North Koreans have worked in Russia, earning millions of pounds a year for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un and his money -bound regime. Then in 2019, the UN banned countries from using these workers in an attempt to cut Kim’s funds and stop it from building nuclear weapons, which means that most were sent home.

But last year, more than 10,000 workers were sent to Russia, according to an employee of South Korean intelligence, who spoke to the BBC, provided for anonymity. We were told that they were expected to arrive even more this year, with Pyongyang possibly sending over 50,000 workers in total.

The sudden influx means that North Korean workers are already “everywhere in Russia,” the employee added. While most work on large -scale construction projects, others are appointed to clothing factories and IT centers, they said in violation of UN sanctions forbidding the use of labor in North Korea.

Russian government figures show that over 13,000 North Koreans entered the country in 2024, a 12-fold increase compared to the previous year. Nearly 8,000 of them went into student visas, but according to the intelligence officer and experts, this is a tactic used by Russia to circumvent the UN ban.

In June, a senior Russian employee Sergei Shoigu acknowledged for the first time that 5,000 North Koreans would be sent to restore Kursk, a Russian region seized by the Ukrainian forces last year, but have been repelled back.

The South Korean employee told us that it is also “probably” some North Koreans will soon be located to work on reconstruction projects in Russia’s occupied Ukrainian territories.

“Russia is undergoing a severe labor shortage at the moment and the North Koreans offer the perfect solution. They are cheap, hardworking and not problems,” says Andrei Lankov, a professor at the University of Kukmin in Seoul and a well-known expert in North Korea-Russia.

These jobs abroad are highly desired in North Korea as they promise to pay better than home work. Most workers hope to escape poverty and be able to buy a house for their family or start a business when they return. Only the most trusted men are selected after they have been strictly checked and they must leave their families behind.

But the greater part of their revenue is sent directly to the North Korean state as a “loyalty fees”. The rest of the faction-usually between $ 100-200 (£ 74- £ 149) per month-is marked per book. Workers only receive this money when they return home – recent tactics, experts say to stop them from running.

Once men are aware of the reality of the harsh work and the lack of pay, it can be shaken. Tae said he was “ashamed” when he learned that other construction workers from Central Asia had been paid five times more than him for one -third of the work. “I felt like I was in a labor camp; prison without bars,” he said.

The Jin worker is still shaking when he remembers how other workers will call them slaves. “You are not men, but just machines that can talk,” they pressed. At one point, Jin’s manager told him that he could not get money when he returned to North Korea because the state needs it. Then he decided to risk his life to escape.

Tae decided to defect after watching videos on YouTube showing how many workers in South Korea were paid. One evening, he wrapped his belongings in a liner for a bin, filling a blanket under the sheets of his bed to look as if he were still asleep, and emphasized from his construction site. He welcomed a taxi and traveled thousands of miles across the country to meet a lawyer who helped arrange his trip to Seoul.

In recent years, a small number of workers have been able to organize their escapes using prohibited second -hand smartphones purchased by saving the small daily allowances they receive for cigarettes and alcohol.

In an attempt to prevent these escapes, many sources have told us that the North Korean authorities are now falling into the already limited freedom of workers.

According to Professor Kang of the University of Dong-A, one way the regime has tried to control workers in the last year is by subjecting them to more frequent sessions for ideological training and self-criticism, in which they are forced to declare their loyalty to Kim Jong Un and enter their shortcomings.

Rare options for leaving construction sites are also cut off. “The workers went into groups once a month, but recently these trips have reduced to almost zero,” Prof. Kang added.

Kim Seung-Chul, based on Seoul Activist, who helps save workers in North Korea from Russia, said these trips were more strictly controlled. “They were allowed to leave in pairs, but since 2023 they had to travel in five groups and watch more intensively.”

In this climate, fewer workers manage to escape. The South Korean government told us that the number of North Koreans is doing it from Russia every year and arriving in Seoul has halved by 2022 – from about 20 a year to only 10.

Mr. Lankov, an expert on North Korea-Russia, said the repression was probably in preparation for many more workers who arrive.

“These workers will be the lasting heritage of Kim and Putin’s friendship in wartime,” he said, claiming that workers will continue to arrive long after the war and the deployment of soldiers and weapons ceased.

Additional reporting by Jake Konn and Hosu Lee