Freight Piles Up at Uiju Airport

New commercial satellite imagery shows an increasing amount of cargo stacked in neat, organized piles at North Korea’s Uiju Airfield, a presumed cargo quarantine center near the Chinese border.

The first cargo trains from China since the border lockdowns in 2020 arrived at the airfield just over a month ago, and the volume of goods visible in the latest image indicates additional cargo continues to arrive.

Figure 1. Overview of goods visible at Uiju Airfield.

Image © 2022 Planet Labs, PBC cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. For media licensing options, please contact [email protected].

To date, there are no signs any cargo has left the facility. Although, high-resolution satellite imagery has not been sufficiently available to be certain of this. In recent imagery, however, much of the cargo visible a month earlier appears to still be in the same place as before. If that’s correct, it means that the quarantine period for goods entering the country from China is at least a month long.

Figure 2. Close up of unmoved freight from January 21 to February 22.

Images © 2022 Planet Labs, PBC cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. For media licensing options, please contact [email protected].

North Korea has been under self-imposed isolation since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020, when the country closed its borders to all traffic in and out. Few goods are believed to have entered or exited the country since then. While trade statistics show some traffic between China and North Korea, it appears to have been transported by ship through Nampho Port.

The country’s important rail and road entry points at Sinuiju exhibited no signs of life until mid-January, when a train crossed into China and picked up freight on three successive days and took it directly to the import center at Uiju.

Figure 3. Close up of Uiju Airfield.

Images © 2022 Planet Labs, PBC cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. For media licensing options, please contact [email protected].

Figure 4. Close up of another section of Uiju Airfield.

Images © 2022 Planet Labs, PBC cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. For media licensing options, please contact [email protected].

The latest image continues to support our earlier analysis that the center is subdivided internally into five areas. Each area has a railway platform, two large structures and a large open-air area for storage. It appears that goods are unloaded from railcars and pass through the upper of the pair of large structures, possibly for a decontamination or disinfection procedure, and then placed in the open air on the former runway. The role of the second pair of large structures is unclear, but it could be related to goods leaving the site.

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