There is a buzz in the press: North Korea is escalating the conflict and its soldiers are supposed to bail out the Russians so that they don’t lose the war in Ukraine. 
“Thousands of soldiers from North Korea are to compensate for Russia’s losses on the Ukrainian front,” claims Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau
The corresponding claims by Kiev, Washington and Seoul are being spread by the media without verification.
Russia and North Korea have categorically rejected the accusations that North Korean soldiers are intervening in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The Russians are responding to Western hype by trolling their opponents: During a press conference at the recent BRICS summit, Russian President Putin responded to a question from Keir Simmons of the American broadcaster NBC News about satellite images showing North Korean soldiers in Russia allegedly involved in the war in Ukraine with the sarcastic reply “Pictures are a serious thing!”. At the same time, Russian soldiers are waving North Korean flags at the front.
North Korean and Russian flags next to each other on the war front. Photo: RBC-Ukraine
So far, no one has been able to substantiate the claims of North Korean soldiers’ involvement in the war. There are reports of North Korean soldiers on Russian territory, of ships travelling from North Korea to Russia (without anyone knowing what they are carrying), of pictures of Asian-looking men in Russian uniforms appearing in Russia’s Far East and taking part in training and exercises (without anyone knowing exactly how these photos were taken), and there is much speculation that North Korean troops are moving towards Ukraine or are already on the front line.
Among them, there are also voices claiming that the North Koreans are fighting Ukraine exclusively in Kursk, i.e. on Russian territory. This would be particularly bizarre because, as far as we know, the Ukrainians are losing large numbers of soldiers and equipment in the battle of attrition that Russia is waging there and are being methodically, if slowly, driven out by the Russians in order to minimise their own losses. Why would the Russians still need North Korea to seal the seemingly inevitable fate of the Ukrainians?
And if, hypothetically, the North Koreans were actually fighting on Russian territory, they would not be mercenaries, as some news reports imply. It was the collective West that provided Ukraine with some 13,000 mercenaries and an unknown number of soldiers in uniform as advisers and experts on air defence and key communications and command nodes.
It’s testimony against testimony. Which side can you believe?
Let’s try to approach the issue rationally and without ideology. The logic of a North Korean attack on Ukrainian territory is difficult to understand. The incompatibility of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian soldiers is immediately obvious, as there is no language overlap: North Korean soldiers do not speak Russian and Russian soldiers do not speak Korean. So how can these soldiers work together on the battlefield?
The North Koreans that have been sighted in Russia so far are foot troops without artillery or armour (tanks or armoured personnel carriers). The North Korean People’s Army has not fought in a major land conflict for decades since the armistice in the Korean War in 1953. It therefore lacks expertise and has largely outdated equipment. Incidentally, this was an extremely important factor in the transition of North Korea’s military doctrine to a simpler, cheaper and more effective nuclear deterrent.
Competent on the civilian battlefield: The Korean People’s Army is the largest construction company in North Korea, building and maintaining roads, railway lines, buildings, etc. for the entire country. It also helps the farmers in the rice fields during the planting and harvesting season, for example, as this picture shows, so that enough rice, the population’s staple food, can be harvested. (Picture Felix Abt)
The different military doctrine and military philosophy of the Russian and North Korean armies is also not unimportant, as is the training of the soldiers and the weapons systems. As we know from the experience of the NATO armies, it takes years of training and joint exercises before they are able to fight in a coordinated manner on a war front.
According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, Russia is recruiting 30,000 soldiers per month. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, recently said that 78% of the military recruitment plan has been fulfilled this year and will be fully achieved by the end of the year. It therefore seems downright absurd that Russia is dependent on North Korean soldiers, regardless of whether it is 3,000 or 15,000.
The US News and World Report has just published its ranking of the world’s strongest armed forces, and Russia has overtaken the United States in first place. But why does it need a few thousand North Korean soldiers to fight against the much weaker Ukrainian army, which is already losing the war?
Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defence, says that there are indications that North Korean soldiers are in Russia. It is indeed possible that North Korean soldiers are in Russia for training, especially in training centres for officers. That would not be surprising. As we all know, there is an agreement on defence cooperation between North Korea and Russia, which has been ratified by the Russian Duma, and mutual training and exercises, if they were to take place, would not be incompatible with this agreement. It might violate UN sanctions, and that might be serious, but it has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine!
Tweet from the Pentagon: Proud of the almost complete destruction of North Korea from 1950 – 1953. The American bombers hunted down everything that moved on the ground: children, adults and animals. They destroyed dams, which flooded the barren agricultural land and led to major famines. 20% of the population was wiped out. The author and journalist for the Washington Post, Blaine Harden, speaks of “The US war crime that North Korea won’t forget”.
The defence agreement contains provisions for mutual support if one of the two nations is attacked. The invasion of Kursk by Ukraine represents a significant escalation that can be considered a land invasion of Russian territory. The Ukrainian invasion of Russian territory could at least theoretically trigger the mutual defence agreement concluded between the Russian Federation and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In a hypothetical scenario in which North Koreans are involved in fighting on Russian territory, it is important to clarify that, contrary to some insinuations in news reports, they do not fit the definition of mercenaries. It was the collective West that provided Ukraine with some 13,000 mercenaries and an unknown number of soldiers in uniform as advisers and experts for air defence and key communication and command nodes.
And last but not least: If North Korean soldiers are in Russia and on their way to Ukraine to take part in the fighting there, it is inconceivable that the other BRICS countries (including China, which is well informed about North Korea, or India, which has historical relations with this country) would not know what is going on and would not ask serious questions and express their concern about what is happening.
In the documents published in connection with the BRICS meeting in Kazan, there was no evidence of this. It seems that no one there raised the issue of North Korean soldiers because no one believes that North Korea will take part in this war.
Source: Catholic News Agency CNA
So it looks as if it is mainly a figment of Kiev’s or Washington’s imagination. The Ukrainians, of course, have a particular interest in dramatising the story, because this way they can argue that if North Korean soldiers are fighting alongside Russia in the conflict, there is no reason why NATO countries should not also intervene in the conflict with soldiers alongside Ukraine (whether they would do so is another question entirely).
One newspaper broke away from the united Western mainstream media chorus and pondered the plausibility of a North Korean war deployment on the Ukrainian front, namely the Paris-based Journal du Dimanche.
The newspaper concludes that Kiev wants to internationalise the war with these accusations and also show that Russia does not have enough soldiers, which is not true, because unlike Ukraine, Russia does not lack soldiers.
Citizens of Korean descent in Russia
Oleg Kim is a wealthy Russian businessman and the chairman of the Overseas Korean Business Association. His forefathers came from outside. In 1890, the Russian Empire authorized Korean immigrants to register as Russian citizens after they had first arrived in the Russian Far East in the 1850s. They became the largest ethnic border minority in Russia.
In the Soviet Union, they were subjected to the first forced mass transfer from the Korean border to the north of Khabarovsk and more distant areas such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which began in 1930 and ended in 1937. Korea was then a Japanese colony, and the Soviet state, which regarded Japan as its enemy and feared that Japan, which had allied with Nazi Germany in 1936 when the two countries signed a treaty against the Soviet Union and its allies, might use ethnic Korean citizens in the Soviet Union as spies and saboteurs against the Soviet Union.
In 1956, three years after the death of the paranoid Stalin, the Soviet Union for the first time granted Koreans the freedom to decide for themselves where they wanted to live and what they wanted to do.
Oleg Kim and his delegation requested a meeting with the European Business Association (EBA), the first foreign chamber of commerce in North Korea, whose founding members included representatives from ABB, British-American Tobacco, DHL, Sandvik, Russian Railways and the Russian airline Aeroflot. The talks took place in a restaurant in Pyongyang in 2005 and centred on a range of topics of interest to them, such as agriculture and food processing, light industry and trade.
The picture shows Oleg Kim (3rd from right) and his delegation members as well as EBA President Felix Abt (left, centre) and Dr Barbara Unterbeck, Head of External Relations at EBA (left, at the top of the table)
(Picture Felix Abt)
The cover photo shows North Korean soldiers at a military parade in Pyongyang (Photo Felix Abt)
The author has written two books on North Korea. You can find his profile here.