> It's interesting to discover the reality that packet routing ends up following political affiliations.

Certainly political affiliations have some influence, but also China and Russia have land borders with North Korea and are not at war. It's very common to run fiber optic on/under railroads and vehicle roads, so there you go. It's probably pretty hard to attract an international cable consortium to land in North Korea given everything, but terrestrial cabling is easier to start with anyway.

> I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?

They would have asked APNIC, the Regional Internet address Registry for their region (Asia-Pacific). I can't find an assignment date, but 175/8 was assigned to APNIC in 2009. 2009 lines up with wikipedia reporting of the startup of the current ISP joint venture.

DPRK can certainly get however many IP addresses they want, DPRK just doesn't have that much infrastructure that they want externally accessible.

As far as I know, end-user traffic from within North Korea usually does not originate from those few IP addresses. Or at least not visibly so, they might be connecting to a proxy from a DPRK IP address.