"Russia needs to take a page out of North Korea’s book for a certain number of years: close all our borders, stop pulling punches, bring back all our boys from abroad, and work hard. Then we’ll see some kind of result"

Prigozhin invokes North Korea as a template for a crisis regime: radical isolation, centralized discipline, and uncompromising methods to force national consolidation. “Close all our borders” signals not only tighter immigration and emigration controls, but also restrictions on trade, finance, and information flows, an airtight perimeter against sanctions pressure, capital flight, and dissenting narratives. “Stop pulling punches” urges escalation: fewer constraints on military conduct, harsher domestic policing, and a willingness to accept collateral costs in pursuit of decisive outcomes. “Bring back all our boys from abroad” calls for repatriation of human and financial capital, soldiers, specialists, and elites, to concentrate resources at home and reduce vulnerability to Western jurisdictions. “Work hard” completes the picture: a mobilized, command-style economy with extended hours, rationing, and state direction of industry.

The strategic aim is fortress-building: insulating the system from external leverage, intensifying production of war-critical goods, and enforcing ideological cohesion. It rebukes half-measures and signals impatience with gradualism, corruption, or dual-track policies that try to balance wartime needs with peacetime conveniences. North Korea functions here less as a literal policy program than as a symbol of self-reliant endurance under siege, where sovereignty is preserved by total control rather than by engagement.

Such a turn promises short-term “results” measurable in munitions output, reduced capital outflows, tighter elite loyalty, and fewer avenues for opposition. The costs are steep: contraction of living standards, technological stagnation, and pariah status that throttles innovation and investment. Sustaining compliance would likely require broader repression, while the loss of international linkages would exacerbate long-run decline.

The proposal reveals a worldview in which victory and regime security derive from fear, discipline, and autarky. It is a maximalist wager: trade prosperity and openness for cohesion and wartime efficiency. As rhetoric, it pressures the leadership to commit fully to a siege economy; as policy, it risks locking the country into a durable state of militarized isolation that solves immediate problems by creating enduring ones.