North Korea Joins Europe's War

New evidence suggests Pyongyang is sending troops to fight in Ukraine.

The UK Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward said today at a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine, “It is highly likely that [North Korea] has agreed to send combat troops in support of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It seems that the harder Putin finds it to recruit Russians to be cannon fodder, the more willing he is to rely on [North Korea] in his illegal war.”

To date, Kim Jung-un’s dictatorship is known to have supplied Russia with as many as 1.6 million artillery shells in addition to ballistic missiles, as missile fragments recovered in Ukraine and analyzed by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency demonstrated. In June, Vladimir Putin traveled to Pyongyang for the first time in 24 years on a state visit clearly intended to shore up even more support for a war effort that, by the Kremlin’s own calculations, should have been long done and dusted by now. Following that trip, Putin submitted Russia’s State Duma a draft on ratifying a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between Moscow and Pyongyang, stipulating mutual support in “military and other” assistance in the event that one party was subject to an “armed attack.”

Ambassador Woodward’s comments follow a month of allegations that North Korea is indeed preparing to become a co-combatant in Europe’s largest land war since the Second World War — a contingency the United States has yet to confirm. At the same Security Council confab, Woodward’s colleague, deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood, said the deployment of North Korean forces to Ukraine would be “dangerous and highly concerning development.”

As Ambassador Wood is no doubt aware, there is now documentary evidence, backed by allied intelligence assessments, confirming that the danger is already here.

On Oct. 8, South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun used much the same formulation as Woodward in a speech before his nation’s parliament: “As Russia and North Korea have signed a mutual treaty akin to a military alliance, the possibility of such a deployment is highly likely.” (“Highly likely” in intelligence-speak indicates a near certainty.)

On Oct. 15, the Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda, citing Kyiv’s intelligence services, reported that North Koreans were enlisting in a “special Buryat battalion” consisting of approximately 3,000 personnel. (Buryats are a Mongolic ethnicity native to Russia’s Far East; they were among the first mobilized and dispatched to Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion in Feb. 2022.)

On Oct. 16, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenksyy addressed his own parliament, stating, “Our intelligence has observed not only the transfer of weapons from North Korea to Russia but also the transfer of individuals. These individuals are workers sent to Russian factories to replace those killed in the war, as well as personnel for the Russian army.” A day later, Zelenskyy clarified that Russia aimed to recruit as many as 10,000 North Korean soldiers to aid its war effort, mainly due to Moscow’s problems with mobilizing enough Russians to reinforce its positions on the frontlines.

“They will be ready [to fight in Ukraine] on Nov. 1,” Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, HUR, old U.S. news portal The War Zone on Oct. 17. Budanov stated that 11,000 North Korean infantry troops were on their way, all first to be trained at military bases in Russia’s Far East. Two thousand six hundred, he added, would imminently be deployed to Kursk, where, in spite of a Russian counteroffensive, Ukraine still hangs onto hundreds of square miles of territory.

On Oct. 18, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, with which HUR has been closely liaising, estimated that 1,500 North Korean Special Forces have already arrived in Russia’s Far East for “training and acclimatizing at local military bases,” as Reuters phrased it.

Then came the videos.

The same day Seoul’s spies disclosed their findings, the following clip was posted to the Ukrainian website Militarnyi, showing what appeared to be North Korean soldiers drilling at an undisclosed location in Russia. Smatterings of Korean — “Let’s do it now” — can be heard amid the Russian narration of the videographer. The videographer’s chevron, Militarnyi noted, indicates personnel attached to training centers and garrisons of the Eastern Military District of the Russian Federation — seeming corroboration of Budanov’s assessment of where the North Koreans were headed.

CyberBoroshno, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence project, geolocated the above video as Sergeyevka village, in Primorsky Krai, a region of Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, which shares a border with North Korea. (Primorsky Krai’s administrative center is the port city of Vladivostok.) Sergeyevka is home to Russia’s 127th Motor Rifle Division, as seen below.

Then came another video, this one posted by Ukraine’s StratCom Center, also on Oct. 18, also said to be from Sergeyevka. (A source in Ukrainian intelligence has told me that this footage, filmed only a week ago by a Russian soldier, is from the permanent disposition of Russia’s 872nd Self-propelled Artillery Regiment, one of the units of the 127th Motor Rifle Division.)

Today, two new two new videos were posted online, both also linked to Sergeyevka:

All of which offers compelling proof that neither Ukraine nor South Korea were being hyperbolic or alarmist in their initial assessments. So what are the implications of this development?

The first is that the Biden Administration’s attempts to manage escalation in this war — one of the reasons cited for precluding Kyiv from using Western munitions to strike deep inside Russian Federation territory — is a largely one-sided affair. Russia is escalating, whatever we do. This fact should have been obvious already, as Moscow’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., has been unrelenting in its efforts to remote-recruit via social media Western actors to conduct acts of subversion, sabotage and assassination on NATO soil, absent Washington’s approval of Ukrainian deep strikes. (Some of these I’ve reported on myself; see here. The Economist also has a good summary here.)

Now it looks “highly likely” the Kremlin is enlisting not mercenaries hired in Cuba or abused women factory workers from Uganda to facilitate its war of conquest in Eastern Europe, but conventional soldiers from a nuclear rogue state in the Pacific. With Iran’s continued supply of Shahed drones and ballistic missiles, one might even properly call this an emerging axis, albeit one the United States and Europe do not yet recognize as such.

The second implication is perhaps more encouraging.

Seoul has made it clear what it thinks of Pyongyang’s “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Moscow. North Korean troops in Ukraine represent “a grave security threat” to South Korea because Kim Jong Un won’t have agreed to give something for nothing. What he gets in return could be strategic technology that bolsters his nuclear and conventional capabilities, such as orbital spy satellites. South Korea may well arm Ukraine in response. That would be a hinge moment for Ukraine’s security assistance, which has never been more uncertain in the face of a closely contested upcoming U.S. presidential election.

In 2023, South Korea lent the United States 300,000 rounds of 155 millimeter artillery shells in order to allow the Pentagon to replenish its stocks following repeated U.S. aid packages to Ukraine. (America is now manufacturing more of these munitions, as a direct result of those aid packages: 30,000 rounds per month, as of Feb. 2024, up from 14,000 prior to Feb. 2022.) The U.S.-designed M777 towed howitzer and the French-designed CAESAR and Polish-designed Krab self-propelled howitzers were early and critical pieces of artillery supplied to Kyiv; they fire 155 millimeter shells.

And while South Korea can’t afford to give up much more of its stockpile without risking a serious shortfall in the event of war with its main adversary to the north, it does possesses a surplus of another caliber of artillery rounds that could be quite useful to Ukraine: 3.4 million 105 millimeter shells, according to an analysis by Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Moreover, less than 30 percent of South Korea’s howitzers fire 105 millimeter rounds, meaning the Yoon government can afford to part with quite a lot of them. The Ukrainian Armed Forces operate an “assortment of around 100 105 mm artillery pieces, including the U.S. M101, the U.S./UK M118/M119, and the Italian OTO Melara,” Cancian and Park noted.

As one active-duty artillerist in the U.S. Army told me, “Much of South Korea’s artillery is designed to destroy North Korean armor and artillery. Even without the deployment of North Korean soldiers to the battlefield, North Korean artillery is currently used frequently by Russia to kill Ukrainian troops.” Also, the artillery pieces that shoot 105 millimeter shells are lighter and smaller. As such, they’re more difficult to locate and destroy, including by drones, when dug into dense woods.

“If South Korea decided to arm Ukraine,” the artillerist said, “it would make life extremely unpleasant for Putin and Kim’s force, as they field an artillery force 2-3 times that of the United States.”