Russia Deploys North Korean Workers in Drone Production Under False Visas

In the shadow of an ongoing war, Russia and North Korea have quietly woven their fates together through the bodies of workers — as many as 25,000 of them, deployed under false documents to manufacture the drones reshaping the battlefield in Ukraine. The wages these workers earn do not return to them in any meaningful sense; they flow upward into North Korea's nuclear ambitions, making each drone produced a double instrument of state power. It is an arrangement that reveals how two isolated nations, pressed by sanctions and international censure, have found in each other not merely an ally but