North Korea migrants reveal to the BBC that they send them to work “as slaves” to Russia

One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in the distant Russian East, he was escorted from the airport to a construction work by a North Korean security agent, who ordered not to talk to anyone or look at anything.

“The outside world is our enemy,” the agent told him. According to Jin, he went immediately to work by building high -rise apartment buildings for more than 18 hours a day.

The six workers with whom we talked described the same exhausting days: waking up at 6 in the morning and being forced to build apartments until 2 in the morning of the next day, with only two days off a year.

We have changed their names to protect them.

“Awakening was terrifying: realizing that you had to repeat the same day again and again,” said Tae, another construction worker, who managed to escape from Russia last year.

Tae recalled how his hands grabbed him in the morning, unable to open, paralyzed by the work of the previous day.

“Some people left their position to sleep during the day or fell asleep standing, but the supervisors found them and beat them. It was really as if we were dying,” said another of the workers, Chan.

“The conditions are really bad,” said Kang Dong-Wan, a professor at the Dong-A University of South Korea, who has traveled to Russia on multiple occasions to interview North Korean workers.

“The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night they turn off the lights and work in the dark, with very little security equipment,” he added.

The fugitives told us that the workers are confined day and night in the construction sites, monitored by agents of the State Security Department of North Korea.

They sleep in dirty and crowded maritime containers, infested with insects, or on the floor of uninjured apartment buildings, with tarps covering the doors frames to try to isolate the cold.

A worker, Nam, said that once fell four meters in a work and broke his face, being incapacitated to work. Even so, his supervisors did not allow him to leave the place to go to a hospital.

In the past, tens of thousands of North Koreans worked in Russia, generating millions of dollars a year for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and their regime with financial problems.

Then, in 2019, the UN prohibited countries from using these workers in an attempt to cut Kim's funds and avoid building nuclear weapons, which caused the majority to be sent back home.

But last year, more than 10,000 workers were sent to Russia, according to a South Korean intelligence official who spoke with the BBC under anonymity. This official told us that it was expected that they arrive even more this year and that, in total, Pyongyang would eventually send more than 50,000 workers.

The sudden increase means that North Korean workers are now “everywhere in Russia,” added the official.

Although most work on large -scale construction projects, he said, others have been assigned to clothing factories and data processing centers, in violation of UN sanctions that prohibit the use of North Korean labor.

Official figures of the Russian government show that more than 13,000 North Koreans entered the country in 2024, an increase of 12 times compared to the previous year.

Almost 8,000 of them entered with student visas but, according to the intelligence official and experts, this is a tactic used by Russia to avoid the UN prohibition.

In June, a senior Russian official, Serguéi Shoigú, admitted for the first time that 5,000 North Koreans would be sent to rebuild Kursk, a Russian region taken by Ukrainian forces last year but still find resistance in place.

The South Korean official told us that it was also “highly probable” that some North Koreans soon were deployed to work on reconstruction projects in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.

“Russia is currently suffering a serious shortage of labor and North Koreans offer the perfect solution. They are cheap, workers and do not cause problems,” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at the Kookmin University of Seoul and a recognized expert in relations between North Korea and Russia.

These construction works abroad are very coveted in North Korea, since they promise to pay better than work in their country.

Most workers leave with the hope of escaping poverty and being able to buy a house for their family or start a business when they return. Only the most reliable men are selected, after being rigorously investigated, and must leave their families behind.

But most of its income is sent directly to the North Korean state as “loyalty quotas.” The remaining fraction – generally between $ 100 and 200 per month – is noted in a record book. Workers only receive this money when they return home, a recent tactic, according to experts, to prevent them from fleeing.

Realizing the hard reality of work and lack of payment, can be devastating. Tae said he felt “ashamed” to know that other construction workers charged five times more than him for doing a third of the work.

“I felt like in a field of work; a prison without bars,” he said.

Jin is still irritated by remembering how the other workers called them slaves. “They are not men, only machines that can speak,” they made fun.

At one point, Jin's boss told him that he could not receive any money when he returned to North Korea because the State needed it. It was then that he decided to risk his life to escape.

Tae made the decision to desert after watching videos on YouTube that showed how much the workers charged in South Korea. One night, he put his belongings in a garbage bag, placed a blanket under his sheets so that it seems that he was still sleeping and left the work. He called a taxi and toured thousands of kilometers through the country to meet with a lawyer who helped him organize his trip to Seoul.

In recent years, a small number of workers have been able to orchestrate their escapes using forbidden smartphones, bought saving the small daily allocation they received for cigarettes and alcohol.

In an attempt to avoid these leaks, several sources have told us that North Korean authorities are now further restricting the already limited freedom of workers.

According to Kang, from the Dong-A University, one of the ways in which the regime has tried to control workers during the last year is by submitting them to ideological training and more frequent self-criticism sessions, in which they are forced to declare their loyalty to Kim Jong-un and record their failures.

The few opportunities to get out of construction works have also been reduced. “Before, the workers went in a group once a month, but recently these trips have been reduced almost to zero,” Kang added.

Kim Seung-Chul, a Seoul activist who helps rescue North Korean workers in Russia, said these exits are being controlled more rigorously.

“Before they were allowed to go out in pairs, but since 2023 they have had to do it in groups of five and with more intense supervision,” he said.

In this context, fewer and fewer workers manage to escape. The South Korean government told us that the number of North Koreans who manage to get out of Russia every year and reach Seoul has been reduced by half since 2022, from 20 a year to just 10.

Lankov, an expert in relations between North Korea and Russia, said that these restrictions are probably due to the preparation for the arrival of many more workers.

“These workers will be the lasting legacy of friendship in times of war between Kim and Putin,” he said, arguing that workers will continue to come long after the war has ended and the shipment of soldiers and weapons has stopped.

*With additional information from Jake Kwon and Hosu Lee.

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