North Korea has been shaping up as Russia's leading weapons supplier, reportedly providing Moscow with extensive military packages, including ballistic missiles and over 3 million artillery shells.
There's a great book called The Dictator's handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn't give less of a damn. There's a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.
The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.
Which they've done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.
If you said in 2019 that there would be a russian-korean arms deal during the war, people would first ask if who is on South Korea’s side, and how many tanks Russia has shipped.
I don’t think they’ve really ever recovered for falling for a couple centuries. But the last 70–80 years, they seem to just keep asking for more coffin nails. They hadn’t even recovered from WW2 and Putin’s resetting any progress and then some.
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