North Korean Arms More Significant than Troops in Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, got to the point in his presidential address last night: “Another state,” he said, was “joining the war against Ukraine”. He was referring to the growing intelligence that shows elite soldiers from North Korea are in Russia preparing to join what has become a fight that, in effect, extends all the way across Asia.

The effect will be greater than the numbers believed to be involved. On Friday, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported that 1,500 members of Pyongyang’s special forces had crossed the border to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east to begin training and some degree of participation in the war in Ukraine.

In the past, isolated North Korea has sent pilots to Egypt, where they fought against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and to Vietnam, where some flew sorties in secret against the US forces. But Pyongyang has never deployed such a large number of its troops abroad.

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But there are also evident political advantages for both parties, most notably a significant tightening of the relationship between two members of the “Axis of Upheaval” – the Russia, China, Iran and North Korea grouping whose members, to varying degrees, want to challenge western military hegemony.

“Russia has offered the kind of political support to Pyongyang that previously was seen only in Beijing, and emboldens the North [of Korea]. It may also be providing missile technology and possibly submarine technology,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a US thinktank, arguing that the Kremlin was using the war in Ukraine as an accelerant to bring the two countries together.

Read the full article and more on The Guardian.