Russian travel to North Korea surges in wartime, with nearly 10,000 trips in 2025 alone
Russian citizens made a record number of trips to North Korea in 2025, according to data from the FSB’s border service reviewed by Verstka and The Moscow Times. In total, Russians traveled to the country 9,985 times last year — the highest figure since the FSB began publishing such statistics in 2010.
More than half of those trips — 5,075 — were classified as tourism, according to the agency’s data. Another 3,080 visits were linked to vehicle maintenance work. Russians also traveled to North Korea 1,156 times for business purposes and 666 times for personal reasons.
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The scale of the increase is striking. Between 2010 and 2019, Russians made an average of about 4,900 trips to North Korea each year. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, travel nearly stopped: the FSB recorded just 41 trips in 2021 and 73 in 2022, though data is only available for two quarters of each of those years. Travel began to rebound in 2023, with 1,238 visits, then rose sharply to 6,469 in 2024, when North Korea reopened its borders to Russian tourists after the pandemic.
North Korea is widely regarded as the world’s most closed country. The surge in Russian travel has coincided with both Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and the rapid deepening of ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. North Korea has supplied Russia with weapons and sent soldiers to support Russian troops on the battlefield.
