The Koreas | Diplomacy | East Asia

Who Is Russia’s New Ambassador to North Korea?

What can Andrei Podelyshev’s appointment tell us about North Korea-Russia relations?

Shortly after his arrival in Pyongyang, Russian Ambassador to North Korea Andrei Podelyshev pays respects at the memorial honoring North Korean troops killed fighting alongside Russian forces, Sep. 26, 2026.

Russia has finally filled the ambassadorial post in Pyongyang, which had sat vacant for nearly eight months. Under a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin on July 28, career diplomat Andrei Podelyshev – at the time, Russia’s ambassador to Nigeria, a post he had held since December 2024 – was named the new ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. A companion decree released him from his Nigerian posting the same day.

Podelyshev arrived in Pyongyang nearly two months later, on September 26, together with his wife, aboard a direct Nordwind flight from Moscow. According to the Russian Embassy and TASS, he headed straight from the airport to the Soviet-era Liberation Monument to pay tribute to fallen Red Army soldiers, before visiting Pyongyang’s newly built memorial complex for North Korean troops killed fighting alongside Russian forces in Kursk.

Podelyshev is, on paper, one of the more genuinely “Korea-literate” diplomats Moscow could have sent. He graduated from MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations) in 1984 and joined the Soviet Foreign Ministry that same year. He speaks both English and Korean, and over his career he has served at the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang itself, as well as at Russian missions in South Korea and the United States.

What stands out, though, is the decade he spent away from Asia desks entirely. From 2005 to 2015, Podelyshev was deputy director of the Consular Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the branch of the ministry responsible for visas, citizenship matters, and the movement of foreign nationals in and out of Russia.

That background is not a minor biographical footnote. Consular policy has become one of the most sensitive, and most scrutinized, levers of the entire North Korea-Russia relationship. Since 2022, Russian consular services have issued tens of thousands of visas to North Korean citizens, the overwhelming majority formally classified as “educational” visas. 

According to Russia’s own data, the number of visas issued to North Koreans jumped from 9,239 in 2024 to 36,413 in 2025, with 35,849 of them, over 98 percent, nominally for education. Investigations by NK Pro and others have shown that these “student” visas are routinely used by Russian firms to bring in North Korean laborers while sidestepping United Nations Security Council Resolution 2375, which bars U.N. member states from issuing work permits to North Korean nationals.

The Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, an 11-country group tracking sanctions evasion, went further in a report released September 16, 2026, stating, “The Russian government has created a student visa scheme to camouflage North Korean laborers in Russia as students,” including workers employed in drone manufacturing at Russian defense-industrial sites such as the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan The report estimates that 15,000 to 30,000 North Korean laborers were working in Russia by the end of 2025, each generating roughly $7,500 a year in wages – up to five times what similar labor earns in China.

Sending an ambassador with nearly a decade of consular-management experience to preside over an embassy now processing this volume of visa traffic is unlikely to be a........

© The Diplomat