North Korean workers dispatched to Russia estimated at 15,000 to 30,000

The multinational North Korea sanctions monitoring team (MSMT), led by the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, analyzed that the number of North Korean workers dispatched to Russia had reached 15,000 to 30,000 as of the end of last year. This is a figure that has increased significantly from the estimate released last year, and Russia's labor shortage after the war in Ukraine was cited as the background. MSMT said that North Korean workers are being deployed to militaryrelated facilities such as drone factories, weapons factories, and steel processing facilities in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone of Russia. Construction workers were also found to have been assigned to reconstruction sites in border areas and logistics warehouses in Moscow. The report pointed out that the North Korean authorities are using student visas to send workers to Russia, and that most of Russia's visa issuances for North Korea last year were student visas. It also analyzed that North Korea's overseas workers generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in several countries last year, and that a significant portion of this is absorbed by the North Korean authorities.