Russia gives North Korea a million barrels of oil, report finds

According to satellite imagery study from the UK-based Open Resource Centre, a non-profit research organization, Russia is thought to have supplied North Korea with more than a million barrels of oil since March this year.

Leading authorities and UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have told the BBC that the fuel is pay for the arms and personnel China has sent Moscow to bolster its conflict in Ukraine.

In an effort to suppress North Korea’s business and stop it from developing nuclear weapons, these exchanges violate UN sanctions, which prohibit countries from selling oil to the country in small amounts.

More than a hundred different North Vietnamese oil tankers have departed from an oil terminal in Russia’s Far East in full 43 days in the last eight months, according to the satellite images, which were exclusive to the BBC.

More photographs, taken of the ships at sea, appear to show the containers arriving bare, and leaving nearly complete.

North Korea is the only country in the world not allowed to buy oil on the open market. The number of barrels of refined petroleum it can receive is capped by the United Nations at 500,000 annually, well below the amount it needs.

Russia’s foreign government did not respond to our request for comment.

Seven months after it was first revealed that Pyongyang was sending Moscow arms, the Open Source Centre documented the second oil move in a new record on March 7, 2024.

The shipments have continued as thousands of North Korean troops are reported to have been sent to Russia to fight, with the last one recorded on 5 November.

According to Joe Byrne from the Open Source Center,” Russia is silently providing North Korea with a backbone of its own,” while Kim Jong Un is giving Vladimir Putin a lifeline to keep his battle.

” North Korea enjoys a degree of stability that it has n’t had since these sanctions were put in place,” says the statement.

Four former UN panel people who were in charge of monitoring the sanctions against North Korea have confirmed to the BBC that Moscow and Pyongyang’s relationships are growing.

” These payments are fuelling Putin’s combat equipment – this is fuel for weapons, fuel for artillery and then oil for men”, says Hugh Griffiths, who led the board from 2014 to 2019.

Russia has become extremely dependent on North Korea for troops and weapons in exchange for oil, according to UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy in a speech to the BBC.

He added that this was “having a strong impact on security in the Asian coast, Europe and Indo-Pacific”.

While most people in North Korea rely on fuel for their everyday lives, oil is necessary for running the region’s defense. To manage munitions factories, fuel Pyongyang’s elite’s cars, and transport missile launchers and troops all over the nation, using diesel and gasoline.

The 500,000 barrels North Korea is allowed to receive fall far short of the nine million it consumes – meaning that since the cap was introduced in 2017, the country has been forced to buy oil illicitly from criminal networks to make up this deficit.

This involves transferring the crude between ships out at sea – a dangerous, expensive and time-consuming company, according to Dr Get Myong-hyun, a senior research fellow at South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy, which is linked to the government’s detective agency.

” Then Kim Jong Un is getting oil immediately, it’s good better value, and chances are he’s getting it for free, as quid pro quo for supplying weapons. What could possibly be superior to that”?

A million barrels is not something a large oil producer like Russia should release, but it is a sizable sum for North Korea, Dr. Go goes on to say.

The North Korean-flagged tankers arrived at Russia’s Vostochny Port with their trackers off, concealing their movements, in all 43 of the journeys the Open Source Centre has tracked using satellite images.

They then made their way back to one of the four ports on the east and west coast of North Korea, according to the images.

” The vessels appear silently, almost every week”, says Joe Byrne, the researcher from the Open Source Centre. ” Since March there’s been a fairly constant flow”.

The team used their knowledge of each ship’s capacity to figure out how many oil barrels they could carry, which has been tracking these tankers since the oil sanctions were first implemented.

Then they studied images of the ships entering and leaving Vostochny and, in most instances, could see how low they sat in the water and, therefore, how full they were.

The tankers, they assess, were loaded to 90 % of their capacity.

According to Mr. Byrne,” we can see from some of the images that if the ships were any fuller they would sink.”

Based on this, they calculate that, since March, Russia has given North Korea more than a million barrels of oil – more than double the annual cap, and around ten times the amount Moscow officially gave Pyongyang in 2023.

This follows an assessment by the US government in May that Moscow had already supplied more than 500,000 barrels’ worth of oil.

Because of cloud cover, researchers are unable to consistently capture a clear image of the port.

” The whole of August was cloudy, so we were n’t able to document a single trip”, Mr Byrne says, leading his team to believe that one million barrels is a “baseline” figure.

More than half of the journeys tracked by the Open Source Centre were made by vessels that have been specifically sanctioned by the UN, which is in addition to the UN sanctions against North Korea that Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, signed off on.

They therefore ought to have been searched for before entering Russian waters.

But in March 2024, three weeks after the first oil transfer was documented, Russia disbanded the UN panel responsible for monitoring sanctions violations, by using its veto at the UN Security Council.

Ashley Hess, who was working on the panel up until its collapse, says they saw evidence the transfers had started.

” We were tracking some of the ships and companies involved, but our work was stopped, possibly after they had already breached the 500, 000-barrel cap”.

Eric Penton-Voak, who led the group from 2021-2023, says the Russian members on the panel tried to censor its work.

” Now the panel is gone, they can simply ignore the rules”, he adds. A new level of contempt for these sanctions is demonstrated by Russia’s recent encouragement of these ships to travel to its ports and load up with oil.

But Mr Penton-Voak, who is on the board of the Open Source Centre, thinks the problem runs much deeper.

These autocratic regimes are now increasingly collaborating to achieve what they want while disregarding the wishes of the international community.

This is an “increasingly dangerous” playbook, he argues.

” A North Korean tactical nuclear weapon, for instance, is something you do n’t want,” says one author.

Concerns are growing over what else Kim Jong Un will receive as Vladimir Putin’s war grows in importance.

The US and South Korea estimate Pyongyang has now sent Moscow 16,000 shipping containers filled with artillery shells and rockets, while remnants of exploded North Korean ballistic missiles have been recovered on the battlefield in Ukraine.

In addition, a recent defense pact between Putin and Kim was signed, which led to the sending of thousands of North Korean troops to the Russian Kursk region, where intelligence reports indicate they are now at war.

The South Korean government has promised to” sternly respond to the Russian and North Korean regime’s violations of the UN Security Council resolutions.”

The Russian-operated spy satellites and ballistic missiles program’s biggest concern is that Moscow will provide Pyongyang with the latest technology.

Last month, Seoul’s defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, stated there was a “high chance” North Korea was asking for such help.

A million barrels of oil is simply not enough money, according to Dr. Go, “if you’re sending your people to die in a foreign war.”

Andrei Lankov, an expert in North Korea-Russia relations at Seoul’s Kookmin University, agrees.

” I used to think it was not in Russia’s interest to share military technology, but perhaps its calculus has changed. The Russians need these troops, and this gives the North Koreans more leverage”.

Josh Cheetham provided additional reporting in London.