Russia has supplied North Korea with over 1 million barrels of oil in exchange for military aid since March

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While Kim Jong Un is providing Vladimir Putin with a lifeline to continue his war, Russia is quietly providing North Korea with a lifeline of its own,

says Joe Byrne from the Open Source Centre

We can see from some of the images that if the ships were any fuller they would sink,

Byrne says

If you’re sending your people to die in a foreign war, a million barrels of oil is just not sufficient reward,

Dr Go says

These transfers are fuelling Putin’s war machine – this is oil for missiles, oil for artillery and now oil for soldiers,

says Hugh Griffiths, who led the panel from 2014 to 2019.

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The vessels appear silently, almost every week,

says Joe Byrne, the researcher from the Open Source Centre

A million barrels is nothing for a large oil producer like Russia to release, but it is a substantial amount for North Korea to receive,

Dr Go adds

The whole of August was cloudy, so we weren’t able to document a single trip,

Byrne says, leading his team to believe that one million barrels is a “baseline” figure

Now the panel is gone, they can simply ignore the rules,

he adds

Dozens of high-resolution satellite images, AIS (Automatic Identification System) data and imagery released by maritime patrol missions tasked with monitoring North Korea’s U.N.-sanctions busting activities show North Korean tankers repeatedly loading at an oil terminal at the Russian port of Vostochny,

the report said,

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This steady flow of oil gives North Korea a level of stability it hasn’t had since these sanctions were introduced,

said Joe Byrne, senior analyst at the Open Source Centre