North Korea has provided Russia with troops that could be mobilized in the conflict in Ukraine, NATO confirmed this Wednesday, October 23.
The countries of the Atlantic Alliance “confirmed evidence of the deployment of North Korean troops in Russia,” said a spokesperson for the organization. “If these troops were intended to fight in Ukraine, it would mark a significant escalation of North Korea’s support for Russia’s illegal war,” she added.
Ukraine also called, this Wednesday, for the surrender of any North Korean fighter found on its territory, with Seoul reporting Pyongyang’s sending of 1,500 additional soldiers to Russia to lend a hand in the war. against kyiv. According to Seoul, some of these soldiers are currently in Russia and must go to the front later.
“You should not die without reason in a foreign country,” wrote a service run by Ukrainian military intelligence in a message addressed to any North Korean “fighters” who were sent by Russia to Ukrainian soil. “You must not suffer the same fate as hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who will never return home!”, we can read in this text also translated into Korean
“Surrender as prisoners of war! Ukraine will shelter you, feed you and warm you!”, urges this service. The project behind the message entitled “I want to live” was designed to help Russian servicemen who would like to surrender. It has a hotline and a chatbot on the Telegram application.
Thousands of North Korean troops, Seoul says
The call for surrender comes at a time when South Korea is reporting sending an additional 1,500 North Korean troops to Russia to fight alongside its troops against the Ukrainian army. “It is estimated that 1,500 more troops have been deployed to Russia,” bringing their total number to 3,000, Rep. Park Sun-won, a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, told reporters in Seoul after a briefing with the National Intelligence Service (NIS). Some 10,000 North Korean troops are to be deployed on Russian territory by December, Park Sun-won added.
The head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Boudanov announced that the first North Korean soldiers should arrive this Wednesday in the Russian region of Kursk, bordering Ukraine, which controls several hundred square kilometers there since its surprise offensive launched in early August.
The NIS said Friday that Pyongyang was sending “soldiers in large numbers” to support the Russian army in Ukraine, as part of a military alliance that could upset the security balance on the Korean peninsula. North Korea has denied providing Russia with forces for its offensive in Ukraine, with a Pyongyang representative at the UN even going so far as to describe Seoul’s assertion as a “baseless rumor”.
NATO and the United States had judged that if this information was confirmed, it would be a potentially dangerous escalation in the Ukrainian conflict. South Korean intelligence assured last week that North Korea had decided to send up to 12,000 troops to help Russia and that some 1,500 soldiers from its special forces were already in Russia to acclimatize before to go to the front soon.
“Direct threat” to peace
South Korea plans to send a delegation next week to NATO headquarters in Brussels to brief the Alliance on the deployment, officials said. On Wednesday, the German Foreign Ministry also summoned North Korea’s charge d’affaires over the latter’s “support” for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“If the information about North Korean soldiers in Ukraine were true and if North Korea supported Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine with troops, this would be serious and would constitute a violation of international law,” writes German diplomacy on X. Such support “directly threatens German security and European peace,” she added. Seoul summoned the Russian ambassador on Monday to demand the “immediate” withdrawal of North Korean soldiers allegedly deployed there.
After almost three years of war, Ukraine finds itself in a critical military situation, its troops retreating for months on the eastern front. The Russian army, more numerous and better armed, very regularly claims the conquest of villages, mainly in the Donetsk region. It is also advancing towards Pokrovsk, an important node for Ukrainian military logistics. Russia also continues to bomb Ukrainian cities and regions almost daily, due to a lack of sufficient air defense systems.