North Koreans tell the BBC that they are sent to Russia to work ‘like slaves’.

The BBC has sent thousands of North Koreans to work in situations like slave to fill a huge labor shortage from Russia’s ongoing invasion in Russia, BBC has learned.

Moscow has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang to help fight the war using its missiles, artillery shells and its troops.

Now, many people from Russia were either killed or fighting – or fled from the country – South Korean intelligence officials told the BBC that Moscow was rapidly trusting North Korean laborers.

We interviewed six North Korean workers, who have fled from Russia since the onset of the war, as well as helping government officials, researchers and laborers.

He expanded how men are subjected to “Aysmal” working conditions, and how North Korean officials are tightening their control over workers to escape them.

One of the workers, Gin, told the BBC that when he landed in the Far East of Russia, he was taken by the North Korean security agent to a construction site from the airport at a construction site at a construction site, who ordered him to not talk or see anything.

“The outside world is our enemy,” the agent told him. He said that he was placed directly for the construction of high -rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day.

All six workers talked to describe the same punished workday-waking up at 6 o’clock and the next morning was forced to create high-rise apartments till 2 pm, just two days a year.

We have changed their names to protect them.

Another construction worker, TAE said, “Waking up was terrible, feeling that you had to repeat the same day again.” Tae remembered how his hands would wake up in the morning, paralyzed from the previous day’s work, unable to open.

“Some people left their positions to sleep during the day, or slept, but observers used to find them and beat them. It was really as if we were dying,” another activist, Chan said.

“Conditions are really disgusting,” said Kang Dong-Gaun, a professor at Dong-e-University, South Korea.

“Workers are made aware of very dangerous situations. Lights are extracted at night and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment.”

Escapes told us that workers are limited to their construction sites day by day, where they are seen by agents of the State Security Department of North Korea. They sleep in dirty, crowded shipping containers, are infected with the bug, or are on the floor of incomplete apartment blocks, pull the tarps on the door frame to try to keep the cold out.

A laborer, name, said that he once fell four meters away from his building site and “collapsed” his face, unable to work. Even then his observers did not let him leave the site to go to the hospital.

In the past, thousands of North Korean leaders, Kim Jong Un and thousands of North Koreans, who earned millions of pounds in a year for his cash-ridden rule, worked in Russia. Then in 2019, the United Nations banned countries from using these workers in an attempt to cut Kim’s funds and to stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons, meaning that most were sent home.

But over 10,000 laborers were sent to Russia last year, according to the South Korean intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to the BBC. He told us that even more was expected to come this year, Pyongyang probably sent a total of more than 50,000 workers.

Sudden influx means that North Korean workers are now “everywhere in Russia”, the official said. While most are working on large -scale construction projects, others are assigned to clothing factories and IT centers, said, in violation of United Nations restrictions banning the use of North Korean labor.

Russian government figures show More than 13,000 North Korean people entered the country in 2024, which increased 12 times the previous year. Around 8,000 of them entered the student visa, but according to intelligence officials and experts, this is a strategy used by Russia to bypass the United Nations ban.

In June, Sergei Shigu, a senior Russian officer, first admitted that 5,000 North Koreans would be sent to reconstruction of the Russian region seized by Ukrainian forces last year, but have been pushed back.

The South Korean official told us that it was also “extremely prone to” that some North Koreans would soon be deployed to work on reconstruction projects in Russian-Quiz Ukrain areas.

“Russia is currently suffering from a severe labor shortage and North Koreans provide the right solution. They are cheap, hard-working and not in trouble,” said a professor at the University of Kukmin at Seoul and a famous expert in North Korea-Russia relations, Andrei Lankov.

These foreign construction jobs are highly reputed in North Korea as they promise to pay better than work at home. Most of the workers expect to avoid poverty and are able to buy a house for their family or start a business when they return. Only the most reliable men are chosen after strictly vetted, and they should be left behind.

But the wholesale of his earnings is sent directly to the North Korean state as “loyalty fee”. The remaining fraction-generally $ 100–200 (£ 74- £ 149) is marked on an account book between one month. Workers only receive this money when they return home – a recent strategy, experts say to prevent them from running away.

Once men realize the reality of hard work and lack of salary, it may disintegrate. Tae said he was “embarrassed” when he came to know that other construction workers in Central Asia were being paid five times more than that for a third of work. “I felt as if I was in a labor camp, a jail without bars,” he said.

The laborers who still become brisses when they remember how other workers would call them slaves. “You are not men, just machines that can speak,” he said. At one point, whose manager told him that when he returned to North Korea, he would not get any money because the state needed it instead. He then decided to put his life at risk to escape.

After watching YouTube videos, TAE decided to blame how many workers were paid in South Korea. One night, he packed his belongings in a bin liner, filled a blanket under the sheets of his bed to see as if he was still sleeping, and exiting his construction site. He received a taxi degree and traveled thousands of kilometers across the country to meet a lawyer, which helped to arrange his journey on Seoul.

In recent years, a very small number of workers have enabled to orkstrate their escape using the prohibited other -hand smartphone, which has saved the small daily allowances obtained for cigarettes and alcohol.

In an attempt to prevent these migration, many sources have told us that North Korean officials are now breaking on limited independence of workers.

According to Prof. Kang of Dong-A University, in a way the government has tried to control workers compared to the previous year, he has been subjected to more frequent ideological training and self-criticism sessions, forcing them to declare their loyalty to Kim Jong Un and log down their failures.

Rare opportunities to release construction sites have also been cut. Prof. Kang said, “Workers used to go out in groups once a month, but recently these trips have become almost zero.”

Seoul-based activist Kim Seown-Chull, which helps to save North Korean workers from Russia, said these outings are being tightly controlled. “They were allowed to leave in the pairs, but since 2023 they had to travel in groups of five and are monitored more intensely.”

In this climate, fewer workers are managed to escape. The South Korean government told us that the North Korean number of people were excluding Russia every year and had increased to half from 2022 – from about 20 to 10 in a year.

North Korea-Russia relations expert Mr. Lanocov said that many more workers were expected to crack in preparation for arrival.

He said, “These activists would be a permanent legacy of Kim and Putin’s warship friendship,” he said, the workers will continue to reach for a long time after the war ended, and the deployment of soldiers and weapons was stopped.

Additional Reporting by Jake Quon and Hosu Lee