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SEOUL, South Korea — Officials here said Monday it is increasingly clear that North Korea has begun supplying badly needed shells and other military equipment to Russia, even as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s regime confirmed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Pyongyang later this week.
The acknowledgment by South Korea’s Unification Ministry was the first official statement after the Biden administration and an open-source intelligence body both said in recent days that they had seen signs of the North Korean munitions shipment.
“North Korea has denied an arms trade with Russia several times, but relevant circumstances are emerging one by one,” Unification Ministry spokesman Koo Byoung-sam said Monday. “The true nature of North Korea, which has attempted to deceive the whole world, has been exposed.”
South Korea said the arms shipments violated longstanding U.N. Security Council sanctions levied on Pyongyang over its nuclear and conventional military build-up.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday it appears that Mr. Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on the deal in their summit in Vladivostok last month, with North Korea seeking sophisticated Russian weapons technologies in return for the munitions to boost Russia’s military and nuclear program.
The White House released images from over a three-week period last month showing over a thousand North Korean containers loaded onto a Russian-flagged ship before being moved via train to southwestern Russia. One photograph shows a Russian-flagged vessel taking aboard some 300 shipping containers on Sept. 7 and the same containers were subsequently photographed by satellite at the port of Dunay in the Russian Far East five days later.
A train packed with containers was spotted at a Russian ammunition depot at Tikhoretsk near the Black Sea — close to the scene of heavy fighting in Ukraine — on Oct. 1.
The transfer comes as Russian forces are engaged in an offensive targeting the Ukrainian-held city of Avdiivka in the Donbas region, the biggest advance by Moscow’s forces since Kyiv unleashed its own broad-front counteroffensive in June.
The timing of the suspected shipments suggests that the deliveries fueled — or backfilled — Russia’s latest offensive in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has struggled to keep its forces supplied in the face of international sanctions and a war that has lasted far longer than Mr. Putin anticipated. Russia has already turned to Iran for military drones to help support the campaign, and a senior Western nation officer told The Washington Times in June that Russian artillery, which had previously been firing shells at multiples to Ukrainian guns, were shooting at rough parity.
An unnamed South Korean Defense Ministry official told reporters that the North Korean supplies were sizable.
“Considering the containers’ capacity, it would be an amount equivalent to hundreds of thousands of shells, which are in most need by Russia,” the official said.
Separately, North Korean state media on Monday announced that Mr. Lavrov would travel to Pyongyang for two days of talks starting Wednesday.
North Korea has major stockpiles of the Soviet-era munitions still used by Russian forces. Mr. Lavrov’s visit follows one by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang in July, setting the stage for the Sept. 13 meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim.
Defense analysts here say the shipment appeared to be clearly timed for the major Russian offensive action, after months in which Russian troops were largely holding defensive lines against a slow-moving Ukrainian advance in the south and east.
“The timing is a little short — or it’s a big coincidence,” said Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general.
Mr. Chun added that, were he planning a major operation, he would want his ammunition dumps filled “at least a month before — but maybe for the Russians, it’s a bit earlier.”
Even before the White House announcement, North Korea-focused website Beyond Parallel posted online satellite imagery taken on Oct. 5, showing cargo trains loaded with containers at the North Korea-Russian border railway station of Tumangang. The hub, the website said, is busier than any time during the past five years.
“The dramatic increase in rail traffic likely indicates North Korea’s supply of arms and munitions to Russia,” the website’s analysts wrote. “However, the extensive use of tarps to cover the shipping crates/containers and equipment makes it impossible to conclusively identify what is seen.”
Despite the North Korean arms, The Associated Press reported that Ukrainian officials said Monday they see signs the Russian offensive against Avdiivka is losing momentum.
Ukrainian forces repelled 15 Russian attacks from four directions on the city over the previous 24 hours, the Ukrainian General Staff said, down from 60 sorties in the middle of last week.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that has provided near-daily in-depth accounts of the fighting, reported Sunday that “Russian forces continued offensive operations aimed at encircling Avdiivka … but have yet to make further gains amid a likely decreasing tempo of Russian operations in the area.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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