In the shadow of a distant war, North Korea has discovered an unlikely prosperity — Moscow's payments for troops and materiel in Ukraine have delivered between $7.7 and $14 billion to Pyongyang over three years, a sum approaching half the nation's annual economic output. Kim Jong Un is spending this windfall across military ambition, civilian construction, and the physical infrastructure of a deepening alliance, reshaping a country long hollowed out by sanctions. Yet the architecture of this revival rests on a single, fragile foundation: the continuation of a war that neither Pyongyang control