The shortfall could swell to 2.4 million by 2030, according to Russia’s Labor Ministry, from 1.5 million today.

Now, North Korean laborers are pouring into Russia, prized by local employers for their low wages and willingness to work 12-hour days without complaint.

North Korea has dispatched around 15,000 workers to Russia, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers on Wednesday. Many are believed to have entered the country on student visas. In 2024, the number of North Koreans entering Russia jumped 12-fold from the prior year, according to Moscow figures.

For now, they are largely confined to Russia’s Far East, but Russian industry leaders and officials have expressed a hope that more North Korean workers could soon arrive in major cities, including Moscow.

The United Nations Security Council bars the use of overseas North Korean migrant workers.

But in recent years, Moscow and Pyongyang have flouted those rules, as well as many others aimed at penalizing Kim for his nuclear-weapons program.

North Korea sent 12,000 soldiers to support Russia’s war on Ukraine last year, South Korean officials say, and an additional 3,000 this year following mass casualties. The soldiers were decisive in Russia’s efforts to expel Ukrainian forces that had occupied a region in southern Russia.

Pyongyang is also sending lethal weapons to Russia, including a ballistic missile that Ukraine said killed 12 people and injured almost 90 in Kyiv in late April.

The two countries are boosting cross-border trade. Putin even gifted Kim a luxury limousine.

In recent days, Putin hailed Russia’s friendship with North Korea as one “forged on the battlefield.”

Even with a dramatic uptick in numbers, North Koreans won’t be able to fill Russia’s labor deficit alone. But the Kim regime can offer significant help in Russia’s Far East, an area bordering North Korea that Putin has long envisioned as an industrial base.

Russia has sought for years to revive the area, handing out free land to reverse depopulation in a region rich in timber, minerals and oil that has also drawn interest from Chinese investors. The initiative has had limited success.

Russia has said it abides by the U.N. restrictions on the Kim regime, while advocating for sanctions on Pyongyang to be relaxed. Putin took aim at the U.N.’s ban on North Korean overseas workers last June, just weeks before he traveled to Pyongyang and struck a mutual-defense pact with Kim.

“These are our neighbors,” Putin told state media in Moscow. “We will develop our relations whether people like it or not.”

‘More, the merrier’

The rise of North Korean workers in Russia summons memories of the past. For decades, Pyongyang sent tens of thousands of laborers who largely worked in construction and logging. The regime pockets more than 90% of workers’ wages, North Korean defectors say, but the remaining salary of between $100 and $200 is still a significant sum in a country where people earn just a few dollars a month, they add.

When the U.N. ban took effect in late 2019, thousands of the 30,000 North Koreans then working in Russia returned home, dealing a blow to Russia’s migrant workforce.

In recent years, Russia has leaned on overseas laborers from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, who earn far more working in Russia and support their home economies through remittances.

But the allure of North Korean workers didn’t go away, especially after Pyongyang became one of Putin’s loudest—and only—backers following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Andrei Orlov, director of a construction company in Moscow, said his business once employed dozens of North Koreans before the U.N. ban. Back then, he recruited workers with the help of a North Korean intermediary.

Not long ago, Orlov said he sat down in Moscow with the same intermediary, who traveled from North Korea for the meeting. They discussed laborers able to lay bricks and pour concrete. Orlov complained about the shortage of manpower and said some laborers were now demanding twice the rate they were paid a few years ago.

The exchange ended with a deal: 50 North Koreans would soon be sent. Orlov expects the workers to arrive by the summer and he ultimately aims to hire 300 or more. He said he plans to hire lawyers to ensure compliance with regulations, though he didn’t comment on any possible violations of the U.N. sanctions.

“The more, the merrier,” Orlov said. “I’d like my company to be a Russian market leader in attracting North Korean specialists.”

The main builders’ union in Russia has said the industry employs North Koreans as a way to deal with labor shortages. Some 120 companies inside Russia employ North Koreans, according to a March 2024 U.N. report on Moscow’s sanctions evasion. Moscow said many of the identified companies are no longer active or have outdated information.

Marat Khusnullin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, has even suggested North Koreans could help with the reconstruction of certain war-hit areas, including Russia-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine.

One North Korean tile-layer, Khusnullin said, can do the work of two Russians.

A welcome sign

North Koreans can provide the greatest lift in Russia’s Far East, where signs of Moscow’s deepening alliance with Pyongyang are everywhere.

Trains course regularly across the border, multiple flights depart daily for North Korean cities and a new bridge is being built across the Tumen River that spans the border.

North Koreans were brought in to help build a school in the regional capital that had faced multiple delays due in part to a manpower shortage, local media reported in September.

Zane Han, a former North Korean migrant laborer, said he was paid around $150 a month to work on a Russian construction site in the late 2010s. Such overseas jobs are coveted inside North Korea, since most people never get the chance to leave the information-repressed regime.

Han said he had to bribe North Korean government officials to be dispatched in 2018 on a student visa. He kept working in Russia past the U.N. ban, with the Russian police often checking the North Korean workers’ visas. Trips to the grocery store were nerve-racking due to the fear of being sent home.

At a certain point before his 2022 defection to the south, Han said the scrutiny dropped off.

“It became clear that the police weren’t interested in inspecting us anymore,” he said.

Some 8,600 student visas were issued to North Koreans in 2024, according to official Russian data. A year ago, Russia’s Education Ministry divulged the actual number of North Koreans studying at the country’s universities.

It was 130.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com and Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com