On 28 October the Pentagon confirmed recent intelligence reports that North Korea has deployed around 10,000 troops to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Nato’s secretary-general Mark Rutte said that some North Korean units had already reached the Kursk region of south-western Russia, where Ukrainian troops are braced for an imminent assault to take back territory they have held since August. The deployment was “a significant escalation”, warned Rutte, and “a dangerous expansion” of the war.
The immediate impact will be felt in Ukraine. North Korean troops might not actually cross the border to fight in Ukrainian territory, where the Russian military is slowly grinding forwards in the eastern Donetsk region towards the strategic rail hub of Pokrovsk. Yet their arrival to the region will free up Russian soldiers and force the Ukrainian military to decide whether to reinforce its positions in Kursk or risk ceding the ground they currently control.
Assimilating foreign military units into the Russian lines will not be a simple task. Ukrainian military intelligence estimates that one Russian interpreter will be deployed for every 30 North Korean troops. But imagine how that system will work under fire. The two militaries’ training and tactics differ, and North Korean troops have had no combat experience since the Korean War in 1953.
But with the conflict now lurching towards its fourth year and settling into a punishing war of attrition, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is calculating that the outcome will be decided by the numbers: the stocks of missiles, drones and artillery shells Russia has to pummel Ukraine, and the lives he is prepared to sacrifice. If he can outsource some of the fighting and dying to the soldiers of a neighbouring autocrat, then so much the better for his own domestic politics.
Beyond the impending battlefield implications, the other danger for Ukraine is that the arrival of North Korea troops fuels the growing narrative among sceptics in the US and Europe that Ukraine cannot win this war, and so further deliveries of military aid will only prolong a hopeless fight. Already facing the prospect of a hard winter ahead, with Russian forces gradually advancing in the east and bombarding Ukraine’s power grid, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will come under ever greater pressure in the coming months to show that there is still a feasible path to victory ahead. (The outlook will be even more precarious if Donald Trump wins the US election next week.)
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, must scarcely be able to believe his luck. Just two years ago, his country was on the brink of famine as chronic food shortages were exacerbated by his decision to seal the country’s borders during the Covid-19 pandemic. His short-lived bromance with Trump had fizzled out with no prospect of relief from the international sanctions his nuclear weapons programme has wrought. Relations with China, North Korea’s sole ally and largest trading partner, were strained and Kim appeared to be isolated. But now the North Korean leader and his sizeable armed forces – he commands the world’s fourth-largest military – are suddenly in demand.
When Putin travelled to Pyongyang for a state visit in June – the second time the two leaders had met in less than a year, and the first time in 24 years that Putin had deigned to visit the North Korean capital – the Russian president praised Kim’s support for his war and they signed a mutual defence treaty that resurrected their Cold War alliance, promising to provide each other with “military-technical assistance” and render assistance if the other was attacked. North Korea was already supplying artillery shells and ballistic missiles to Russia (although Russian military bloggers have complained that the ammunition is so unreliable it has endangered Russian troops) and it is not hard to envisage what Kim might request in return. Pyongyang has been trying for years to perfect its intercontinental ballistic missile technology, satellite launch capabilities, and to develop quiet submarines that are harder to detect. Russia has expertise in all three.
At a minimum, the burgeoning relationship with Russia promises an injection of hard cash to shore up Kim’s regime, which will be used to reward the elite and fund his weapons programmes rather than to help his impoverished citizens. Pyongyang will also have no fear of further meaningful action in response to its nuclear or missile tests from the UN Security Council, where Moscow will be able to wield its veto in North Korea’s defence. Whereas Russia and China voted with the US to impose wide-ranging sanctions on Pyongyang after its weapons tests in 2017, it is hard to imagine either country doing so now. (The armoured limousine Putin and Kim drove around Pyongyang in June, smiling gleefully in each other’s company, appeared to be in direct breach of the sanctions Russia once voted for.) The North Korean military stands to benefit, too, from Russian training and battlefield experience. The losses that follow will be of little concern to a leader for whom the lives of his countrymen have always been cheap.
Kim also gains from this arrangement in a broader strategic sense by lessening his dependence on China. His relationship with Xi Jinping has often been strained – the two leaders did not meet during their first five years in power – as has been the case with the broader China-North Korea relationship since its inception, despite the neighbouring powers’ supposedly shared ideology and outward appearance of unanimity.
Beijing does not want Kim’s regime to collapse, preferring the status quo to the prospect of a unified peninsula on China’s eastern flank under the leadership of US-allied South Korea. But China has long been concerned by Kim’s belligerence, fearing that his actions could trigger a new war on the Korean Peninsula, and a nuclear arms race across the region, both of which would harm China’s interests and threaten its national security. Now that Kim has something Putin wants, he will hope to play off Beijing and Moscow against one another, just as his grandfather, North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, did during the Cold War. The result will be an emboldened and ever-more dangerous Kim, who ordered the road and rail links to South Korea to be blown up in September and has abandoned any pretence that he seeks peace with the country he has called North Korea’s “principal enemy”.
The global ramifications of Russia’s expanding war are already being felt. Within hours of the first reports that North Korean troops had arrived in Russia, South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol warned that his country would not “sit idle” when confronted with a “provocation that threatens global security beyond the Korean Peninsula and Europe”. Yoon said Seoul would now consider providing weapons directly to Ukraine, and South Korean officials have briefed all 32 Nato allies on the intelligence they have gathered so far. In response, Moscow has threatened “consequences for the security of South Korea” if Seoul becomes directly involved in the war. The consequences of this conflict were never confined to Europe, but now it is entering a new phase. Ukraine is preparing for the arrival of the first North Korean troops on the battlefield within days. This, warned Zelensky during a recent meeting with European allies, “is the first step to a world war”.
[See also: Putin stares down the West]
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