A photograph distributed by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency shows North Korean soldiers parachuting onto a forbidding-looking dirt hillside as soldiers on the ground heft rifles and machine guns. Clad for winter weather in Russian combat fatigues, they’re training to go to war against Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region, where some of them are already fighting with Russian front-line units.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reports “around 11,000 troops were assessed to have been relocated to Kursk in late October after completing local adjustment training in northeastern Russia,” according to Seoul’s Yonhap News. “Having been assigned to Russia’s airborne brigade or marine corps, [some] are undergoing training in tactics and drone response, while others have participated in combat.”
The report that North Korean troops are joining Russian marine and airborne units implies they’re better trained, and in better condition, than most of North Korea’s 1.2 million troops, more than half of them within 50 miles of the line with South Korea. While North Korean troops may be somewhat better fed than the vast majority of the North’s 25 million citizens outside the elite in Pyongyang, many are also reportedly weak and hungry.
The North Korean soldiers facing off against Ukraine, though, look to be in good physical shape in a photo showing the Russians giving them the gear they need for facing tenacious Ukrainian forces in freezing weather, in the North’s first taste of war since the Korean War. “North Korean troops, having entered combat, may have suffered casualties or wounds,” Yonhap said, reporting on a briefing given to South Korean lawmakers by the South’s National Intelligence Service. It added that “efforts are underway to determine the details of the combat circumstances and the extent of the damage.”
Whatever happens to his troops in Ukraine, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is sure his regime will profit immensely from what a prominent Russian scholar on North Korea, Andrew Lankov, observes “could be the largest overseas deployment in history” of North Korean troops.
“It’s easy to understand what Pyongyang hopes to gain from this move,” Mr. Lankov, who studied in North Korea years ago, has written books on the North, and now teaches at Seoul’s Kookmin University, writes. “It will earn some money while training some of its best soldiers in real battlefield conditions, and perhaps also gain access to sensitive military technologies that Russia would otherwise be unwilling to provide.”
Russia is reportedly paying nearly $2,000 a month for each North Korean soldier, virtually all of which goes into Mr. Kim’s accounts. That, of course, is in addition to all that Russia is paying for North Korean arms and ammunition for its entire military establishment. Mr. Kim’s “troop dispatch to Russia lays bare a disregard for soldiers’ lives,” a researcher for the Rand Corporation, Diana Myers, wrote in an opinion piece for NK News, a Seoul website.
A retired American Marine colonel, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mark Cancian, sees the Russians as “desperate for manpower.” President Putin, he has said, “wants to avoid a second mobilization, which would involve involuntarily calling up Russian citizens.”
Western estimates show Russia has suffered about 610,000 casualties, according to Mr. Cancian. U.S. officials, he wrote, “estimate that Russia is recruiting 25,000–30,000 new soldiers a month, barely keeping pace with the reported daily casualty rate of 1,000—or 30,000 a month.”
The North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia carrying fresh shipments of arms and ammunition. The NIS said North Korea is providing 170-millimeter self-propelled howitzers and 240-millimeter multiple rocket launchers capable of hitting targets almost anywhere in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told the European parliament that North Korea “could send as many as 100,000 troops to support Russia’s war efforts,” but NK News quoted a source as having said this figure was “improbable, given the toll such a deployment would take on Pyongyang’s own security.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
