SEOUL, South Korea — Reports from Kyiv say 10,000 North Korean troops are undergoing training in Russia’s Far East and could be used to fight in Ukraine.
The account of North Korea’s deployment of troops to Russia is the latest sign of tightening security ties between two prime U.S. adversaries. Last week, unconfirmed reports said a Ukrainian missile strike killed six North Korean officers in the raging war with Russia across Ukraine’s occupied southern and eastern regions.
A South Korean military official told the Yonhap News Agency that the reports were being “closely monitored.”
South Korea and the United States have accused the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un of supplying massive quantities of artillery and rocket artillery munitions to Moscow for the Ukraine conflict.
In June, North Korea and Russia signed a strategic partnership in Pyongyang that called for each party to aid the other if invaded. The Ukrainian surprise military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region may trigger the treaty. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the treaty to the State Duma for ratification.
A fog of uncertainty clings to accounts that North Korean troops will fight alongside their Russian allies.
The Kyiv Post, quoting Ukrainian intelligence sources, reported Wednesday that some 10,000 North Korean troops — more than triple the estimate provided a day earlier — were receiving training in Russia’s Republic of Buryatia. The newspaper said their training facility is the base of Russia’s 11th Independent Airborne Brigade and the North Korean troops are being formed into a specialist Buryat Battalion.
Deputy Secretary of State Kurt M. Campbell, visiting Seoul on Wednesday for talks with regional allies on North Korea, told reporters that the Biden administration was alarmed by Pyongyang’s recent nuclear and missile threats and its growing ties to Russia, which he said was creating “further instability in Europe.
He said U.S. officials were trying to assess the validity of the reports that North Korean troops were preparing to join the fight in Ukraine, The Associated Press reported.
“We are concerned by [the reports] … and we agreed to monitor the situation closely,” Mr. Campbell said.
Buryatia, Russia’s only Buddhist region, lies north of Mongolia. Remote and rarely visited by outsiders, it provides potential cover from prying eyes. Buryats are ethnic East Asians and are visually, if not linguistically, impossible to differentiate from Koreans.
Buryatia, one of Russia’s poorest regions, has been a prime supplier of troops for the Russian army, which has sustained massive losses in the stalemated war that began with the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Buryats won an impressive martial reputation during World War II while fighting for the Soviet Union. Unlike Russia’s notorious Chechen troops, Buryats fighting in Ukraine are not deployed in specialist, segregated units.
The Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars said Buryats have suffered disproportionately high casualties in Ukraine.
Russia’s elite airborne units, known as the VDV, have been used as “fire brigades” in Ukraine, spearheading assaults and operating as mobile reserves, though they have reportedly sustained massive casualties. Three thousand North Korean soldiers, as cited in earlier reports this week, would be enough to outfit a full brigade of three battalions.
In the early stages of the war, Russia’s invading force was formed into “battalion tactical groups,” but those formations proved too small to operate effectively. Brigades are the basic combat units of the war on both sides.
The impact of the North Korean contingent on the fighting is uncertain. Ten thousand troops would, on paper, be enough to man three full brigades.
“One North Korean brigade is hardly a game-changer, from a military point of view,” said Gastone Breccia, an Italian military historian at the University of Pavia.
That does not mean North Korean troops would be useless to Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim.
“I am certain that Putin would welcome North Korean troops to buttress his numbers, his losses being so high,” said Douglas E. Nash, a retired U.S. Army colonel. “What I would be more interested in is whether Kim Jong-un is using this ploy to clean out his prisons.”
The Russian and Ukrainian armies are using convicts on the front line in a desperate search for manpower to refill depleted ranks.
Mr. Putin has conducted one mobilization of reservists and is fighting the Ukraine war with contract soldiers (kontraktniki) as well as prisoners and private military companies to avoid deploying conscripts, particularly from wealthy, elite cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The use of soldiers from ethnic minorities and poor regions as cannon fodder is a long-held imperial practice. The Ukrainian army said it had captured ethnic Indians and Nepalese in Russian uniform.
“The old Soviet Union drew heavily upon ethnic minorities from [Central Asia] to fill its ranks,” said Mr. Nash, a military historian who has long studied World War II’s eastern front.
So extensive were their numbers that the German army formed “legions” of captured Soviet Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Tatars and Turkmens, he said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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