Those of you who've been following Russia in the last few years of its >11.5 year war to seize Ukraine will be interested that its neighboring dictatorship in North Korea, which has been providing the lion's share of Putin's artillery shells, may be running out of ammunition it can spare to sell. Despite shipping 6.5 million artillery shells to Russia since it began arming its former supplier, North Korea's 2025 shipments appear to be approximately half its 2024 shipments, and observers in September of 2025 were unable to identify even a single shipment of artillery shells from North Korea. It hasn't helped that the quality of North Korea's ammunition products has been worse even than the quality of Russia's.
Russia's economy has been suffering, its population has been in decline since before it started stealing Ukrainian children, its casualties exceed 1.1 million (larger than its active military), and recruiting is so bad Russia has been sending its underperforming recruiting officers to frontline deployment in Ukraine to die. Soviet-era stockpiles of ammunition and armored vehicles have been exhausted. Funding Putin's war with oil exports has faced multiple headwinds, ranging from economic sanctions to deep-Russia attacks on petroleum infrastructure that reduces production, interferes with transport, eliminates significant elements of Russia's refining capacity (video: a petroleum distillation column struck), and destroys Russian export facilities (like this one on the Black Sea). Just keeping its facilities operating is a challenge, seriously draining margins and preventing altogether the export of refined petroleum products, with which Russia is struggling to adequately supply military units who increasingly are deployed in meat waves unsupported by armor.
Russia's 11.5-year war appears to have stabilized as a grinding war of attrition, which Russia has always assumed works in its favor. Yet in this time Russia manages to control approximately 20% of Ukraine's surface, most of which was taken in its 2014 surprise offensive supported by corrupted officers in the Soviet-trained legacy military stationed in the affected areas of Ukraine. The last couple of years, Russia's gains amount to approximately 1% and it has exacted from Russia an enormous cost in blood, matériel, and treasure. Although Russia postures over the destruction of little towns that used to house 10,000 civilians before they fled, the fact on the ground is that what Russia has been touting as gains have come at an enormous cost.
St. Petersburg's crematorium has been expanded to handle 250 bodies per day, and that's a city from which Russia has deliberately avoided recruiting in order to keep unrest from the two urban centers that differentiate Russia, at least cosmetically, from third-world countries (the other being Moscow).
