Following the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to North Korea on June 19, speculation regarding the possible future of the two neighboring states’ relationship has been widespread. This has largely centered on the possibility of North Korean labor and munitions exports to Russia, and transfers of Russian nuclear, space, and defense technologies and commodities in return.
While Russia has been reported by White House sources to be operating North Korean ballistic missiles and rocket artillery systems, and to have received considerable quantities of artillery munitions, one often overlooked possibility is that Russia could seek to acquire North Korean main battle tanks to equip its frontline forces.
Russian tank procurement was highly conservative preceding the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and while over 500 Soviet built T-72 tanks and a smaller number of T-80s were deeply modernized in the 2010s, only 10 newly built tanks, T-90Ms, were acquired that decade – averaging one tank per year.
Russia began to face significant shortages of main battle tanks from mid-to-late 2022, as the country expanded its ground forces while its armor took significant losses in the war’s initial months in particular. Reports that Russia acquired T-72 tanks from Belarusian stockpiles for refurbishment for frontline service, and subsequent confirmation that it was bringing long since retired T-62s, then T-55s, out of storage for combat use, provided further indications of major shortages.
While Russia’s loss rates have diminished considerably, with the summer of 2023 in particular having marked a turning point in the ground campaign in its favor, there have also been indications that efforts to increase tank production have been met with underwhelming success. Where the Soviet Union managed to produce approximately 4,000 T-72 and T-80 tanks annually in peacetime, with a significant surge capacity possible in wartime, Russia is thought to be struggling to reach around 200 tanks as a result of serious post-Soviet industrial decline.
Russia’s tank shortages could potentially provide a major opening for North Korea to emerge as a supplier of armor to Russia. North Korea in the past has exported domestically produced tanks to Ethiopia and Iran and modernization packages, including features such as laser range finders, to enhance Soviet-built tanks operated more widely abroad.
Available information on North Korea’s latest class of main battle tank, the Chonma 2, indicates that it is more capable than most tanks in Russian service, with a modern battle management system, thermal sights, a hard kill active protection system, and access to armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS) rounds with an excellent length-to-diameter ratio indicating a very high penetrative capability. (Unveiled in 2020, the tank was previously referred to in the West as the “M2020” before its actual designation was confirmed in May.)
While integration of an entirely new foreign tank class could cause complications for Russia’s ground forces, and perhaps most importantly would represent a major loss of face for the country’s own tank industry, the possibility of Russia acquiring older classes of North Korean tanks derived from Soviet designs remains more significant.
Although North Korea is currently producing the Chonma 2 main battle tank for domestic use, and previously produced the Chonma-215/216 from the late 1990s, the country is still heavily reliant on derivatives of the Soviet T-62, which were locally produced under license as the baseline Chonma tank. Representing the first of three generations of indigenous North Korean tanks, the Chonma is highly similar to the original T-62, and with North Korea estimated to field over 1,200 their export could allow Russia to significantly enlarge its fleet of T-62-type tanks.
These vehicles could be refurbished and modernized in North Korea, with the technological advances demonstrated by the Chonma 2 program indicating that local industry is able to equip tanks with thermal sights and other modern fire controls, explosive reactive armor and active protection systems, as well as highly capable munitions. An upgrade package could be tailored to Russia’s requirements depending on the required speed of delivery and costs, and would come in parallel to the refurbishment of T-62s from storage in Russia itself with subsystems such as thermal sights to prepare them for frontline use. As the T-62’s role in the Russian Army has only grown, with new generations of upgrades continuing to appear, this possibility appears all the more significant.
With Russia having scrapped its T-62s on a significant scale following the Soviet Union’s disintegration – as well as T-64s, T-55s and other tank classes that predated the T-72 – the continued widespread use of the tank class in North Korea provides a valuable opportunity for further acquisitions. Funding from sales of second-hand T-62s could help cover the costs of Chonma 2 acquisitions, with the new tank likely to be several times as costly to produce due to its sophisticated features. Such exports could also provide Russia with an incentive to make armored warfare related technology transfers to North Korea, since this could directly benefit the capabilities of its own army’s frontline units.
The return of the T-62 to the frontlines of the Russian Army’s inventories also raises the possibility that North Korea could be relied on to supply 115mm smoothbore rounds, which are not used by any other Russian tank class, and thus may not have remained in storage in significant numbers after the large majority of the T-62 fleet was scrapped.
Where previously the Chonma and Chonma-215/216 were expected to offset their significant performance advantages against cutting edge enemy armor with their greater suitability for mountain warfare, the Chonma 2 represents the first North Korean tank class that appears to be genuinely internationally competitive at a high level. This reflects broader trends toward the North Korean defense sector reaching a cutting edge level, as otherwise seen in areas ranging from hypersonic glide vehicles to long-range surface-to-air missile systems.
With Western sources having widely warned that North Korea’s arms exports to Russia could seriously undermine the sanctions regime and set a precedent to allow other countries to more openly import armaments from the country, Russia’s diversion of T-90 tanks produced for export to its own forces potentially opens the possibility for greater North Korean tank exports to the third world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps more significantly, however, is that North Korea’s position as the only major tank producer outside the Western sphere of influence other than China and Russia themselves places its industry in a strong position to capitalize on Russian shortages to potentially make the largest tank exports in the country’s history.