🎓 Students of the Strict Regime: Russia Officially Procures Slaves from North Korea

Permanent surveillance by intelligence officers. Family members held as hostages back home. And in the worker's pocket — barely enough for a pack of cigarettes. An investigation by Trace Investigations, conducted jointly with the South Korean Citizen Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, has for the first time laid out the full mechanics of this scheme: who supplies, who buys, who takes a cut, and through exactly which bank the money flows.

The scale is staggering. North Korea keeps approximately 100,000 of its own citizens in conditions of forced labour across roughly forty countries — from Russia to Myanmar, from Vietnam to Central Asia. The annual turnover of this system runs to around half a billion dollars. This is not a shadow economy or spontaneous criminal enterprise. It is a planned extraction system built by the state and managed through the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of State Security, and the Second Economic Committee — the body responsible for a substantial share of the country's defence industry. They organise the export. They pocket the proceeds. They exploit their own population, free of charge.

The system was operating in Russia long before the war. As far back as the 2018 World Cup construction in St Petersburg, local residents were already noticing unusually large columns of North Korean workers moving through the city. People looked, and adapted. In 2017, the UN Security Council introduced sanctions explicitly prohibiting the use of North Korean labour abroad. Russia — a permanent Security Council member — voted for those restrictions.

Rather than comply, Moscow simply rebranded the scheme. Student visas. Educational programmes. Internships. Officially, these people come to study — and the numbers keep growing: in 2025 alone, roughly 35,000 educational visas were issued to North Korean nationals. They are barely visible in Far Eastern universities. On construction sites and in meat-processing plants, they are quite visible indeed.

The mechanics are straightforward and cynical. A Russian company requiring cheap and entirely rightless labour approaches a middleman. Investigators identified one such intermediary: a certain Mr. Tkachuk, who heads a structure with the blandly neutral name Inter-State Migration Centre. He operates openly and makes no secret of his terms. A "company" of North Korean workers — exactly one hundred people, because that is precisely how they are counted, in companies — will cost a client 160,000 dollars. The price per person is 1,600 dollars, turnkey: flights, foreign passports, visas, all fees included. The only requirements for the buyer: the company must have been registered for at least three years and must carry no tax arrears. Specialisations — anything. Bricklayer, tile-setter, seamstress, food-processing operative.

The transit hub for routing these workers through Russian legal formalities consists of two educational institutions. The Far Eastern Federal University serves as cover for flows into the eastern regions. And a small Moscow outfit called the College of Assistance turned out to be the more important node: in the years 2023 to 2025, roughly 2.7 billion rubles passed through it, officially recorded as student stipends. The average stipend at a Russian educational institution is 3,800 rubles. Disbursements per "intern" reach 250,000. The discrepancy speaks for itself.

The college signs contracts with industrial enterprises — investigators identified around seventy such enterprises across Russia. Companies pay the college. The college takes its share — 3,500 rubles plus 8.7 percent of each worker's monthly wage — and forwards the remainder to North Korean intermediaries, who route it onward to the Pyongyang state treasury. The workers themselves receive no more than ten percent of the formally accrued sums. What they call a salary is pocket money for cigarettes and sweets.

Among the companies employing North Koreans are entirely recognisable names. Cherkizovo, Russia's largest meat processor. The Velikiye Luki Meat Plant. The Spartak garment factory. OSCO Product, a textile firm. In 2025 it emerged that Wildberries had been hiring North Korean nationals for its warehouse distribution centres in Ryazan and Elektrostal, outside Moscow. The market is, in effect, elastic: with a systemic labour shortage, North Koreans can be placed anywhere — and they are.

The conditions described by escapees — the few who managed to break free, seizing whatever opening appeared: a hospital visit, a trip to the market — are not the conditions of labour migration or contract employment. Workdays run to approximately twenty hours. Housing is in locked dormitories on enterprise premises, run as secured facilities. Movement beyond the territory is permitted only in groups, only under escort. North Korean officers are in permanent residence — wardens operating under the cover of senior colleagues. And back home, family members remain as a silent guarantee of compliance.

The scheme could not function without a financial infrastructure inside Russia. The money moves through a bank called Agora. Its key owner is Olga Overyanova, daughter of Yuri Overyanov — a man of considerable influence and deliberate obscurity. From 2013, he served as First Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, which is to say the right hand of Nikolai Patrushev. Since February 2023, Overyanov has been an aide to the chairman of United Russia, Dmitry Medvedev. Lieutenant-General. Former silovik with direct access to the Security Council. Hundreds of millions, billions of rubles in transit through the family bank — entirely consistent with the logic of how Russia's corruption metabolism operates.

In parallel, Russia is supplying North Korea with precisely what international law forbids it to supply: petroleum products — diesel, petrol, fuel oil. UN Security Council sanctions close these shipments explicitly. Russia continues them through an elaborate network of intermediaries — logistics companies, banks, customs brokers, certification firms operating across the Far East. Investigators linked a portion of these companies to Gazprom — or more precisely, to people who came out of Gazprom. In exchange, North Korea supplies Russia with artillery shells and soldiers: the ones fighting against Ukraine.

What makes this scheme politically singular is precisely its sanctions architecture. Western restrictions Moscow has learned to dismiss rhetorically — confrontation with the collective West, double standards, sovereign prerogative. But violating UN Security Council sanctions is a different matter. Russia voted for those restrictions itself. Russia made those commitments itself. And Russia is systematically breaking them — at the level of state institutions, intelligence services, large business, and a compliant banking sector. Every future round of UN negotiations on the North Korean file will carry this weight. However much Russian diplomats may wish to project injured innocence, the investigation has already documented otherwise.

Human trafficking as a line item in state revenue. Forced labour as the answer to a workforce deficit. Intelligence officers serving as overseers for North Korean contract workers. And a lieutenant-general sitting on the board of the bank through which the "stipends" flow. This is not a violation. This is a system. And it is working.