North Koreans are working at Russia’s Alabuga drone complex, a sanctions team said, as a separate report alleged forced labor there and drew attention to U.N. restrictions on overseas labor.
Citing information from a participating government, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT) said in a Sept. 16, 2026, report that North Koreans had been deployed to Russia’s drone industry, including Alabuga in Tatarstan. Its report gave no verified headcount for the complex and placed the deployment below earlier estimates.
An Oct. 14, 2026, report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the George W. Bush Institute argued that labor supplied to Alabuga amounts to forced labor. The authors cited limits on North Korean overseas workers’ ability to leave and the state’s diversion of their earnings. The reports do not establish pay or movement restrictions for individual workers at Alabuga.
One prominent workforce figure came from Defence Intelligence of Ukraine. In a Nov. 14, 2025, statement, it said Moscow planned to bring roughly 12,000 North Koreans to businesses across the Alabuga Special Economic Zone before the year ended. The statement described proposed pay of about $2.50 an hour and shifts of at least 12 hours. It did not document arrivals or show that the proposed terms took effect.
For North Koreans working abroad, the MSMT estimated that authorities take 80% to 90% of wages. It put revenue from the overseas labor program at $450 million to $800 million in 2025. The monitoring team also estimated that 15,000 to 30,000 North Koreans worked throughout Russia at the end of that year. None of those figures measures Alabuga alone.
Russia makes Geran variants of Iranian-designed Shahed drones at Alabuga for use in its war against Ukraine. The report’s authors identified Russia’s demand for drones and North Korea’s access to overseas earnings as incentives for the arrangement. They warned that technicians could acquire manufacturing knowledge useful to North Korea’s drone program; the reports do not establish that any such knowledge has been transferred.
The authors described North Korea’s decades of labor exports as background to the deployment. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2397 required countries to repatriate North Koreans earning income in their jurisdictions by December 2019, subject to exceptions. The authors called for investigations into recruitment networks and conditions at Alabuga.
