SEOUL, South Korea — Seoul is in a bind, with Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially confirming the presence of North Korean troops who could soon be deployed to the battlefield in Ukraine.
Speaking at a press briefing on Friday, Mr. Putin acknowledged that photos of North Korean troops in his country “are a serious thing.”
He was hosting a summit of BRICS leaders — representing the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — in Kazan.
The same day, the Russian State Duma ratified a North Korean-Russian strategic partnership.
“You may be aware that the Treaty on Strategic Partnership was ratified, I believe, just today,” Mr. Putin said. “It has Article 4, and we have never doubted the fact that the [North Korean] leadership takes our agreements seriously. However, it is up to us to decide what we will do and how we are going to do it.”
Article 4 states that if either nation faces “an armed invasion,” the other party should “provide military and other assistance.”
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Subsequently, North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Jong-gyu said, “If there is such a thing the world media is talking about, I think it will be an act conforming with the regulations of international law.”
Analysts said the comments amount to an acknowledgment by both sides that their military partnership has entered a new phase.
“This is as close to a confession as we are likely to get,” Sydney Seiler, a former U.S. intelligence officer on North Korea, wrote in a post on X.
Whether Pyongyang’s deployment will be to the front lines of the war isn’t clear, but there are signs they will engage in combat against Ukrainian forces.
“According to intelligence, the first North Korean soldiers are expected to be deployed by Russia to combat zones as early as Oct. 27-28,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday, calling that “a clear escalation.”
South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun characterized the North Korean troops as “cannon fodder mercenaries.”
His country is struggling to forge a response.
The government in Seoul said Sunday it is sending a delegation to confer with NATO. Last week, President Yoon Suk Yeol suggested directly arming Ukraine, which would be a significant break from traditional South Korean policy.
A person familiar with diplomatic affairs told The Washington Times that Seoul is unlikely to forge any significant policies before the outcome of the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election has been decided.
Here come Kim’s men
Kyiv, Seoul and Washington said last week that North Korean troops were in Russia. Estimates range from the White House figure of 3,000 troops to Seoul’s and Kyiv’s number of at least 12,000.
Those troops are difficult to disguise. Small groups of North Koreans could operate under ethnic cover in the Russian Far East, but large numbers could not. The Russian army’s only ethnically exclusive units are Chechen.
Two Russian social media clips have been widely analyzed. One purports to show armed North Koreans moving on an exercise area, and the other shows Asian troops receiving equipment in a depot.
Over the weekend, Polish media, citing Japanese sources, reported that Kim Yong-bok, a North Korean general seen in Kim Jong-un’s company, had been spotted in Russia. On X, Pyongyang watcher Lee Sung-yoon, a biographer of Kim Jong-un’s sister, identified the general as a special forces commander.
South Korean intelligence claims to have identified a North Korean missile officer formerly photographed alongside Kim Jong-un. The officer is wearing a Russian cap and holding binoculars, standing beside what looks to be a Russian officer. The two are allegedly at the launch site in Ukraine of KN-23 missiles, North Korea’s version of Russia’s “Iskander” tactical ballistic missiles.
Intelligence agencies say North Korea has been supplying Russia with massive quantities of ammunition and rocketry since late last year.
Another clip on social media shows East Asian officers in leather coats, identified but not confirmed as North Koreans, touring central Moscow and taking selfies with excited Russians.
The North Koreans could be used in combat or to “backfill” Russian units holding defenses, freeing those units for offensive operations. They also could be used as labor to rebuild the ruined infrastructure in the parts of Ukraine that Russia has captured.
Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general, said it is “impossible” to guess their role but labor units would require only minimal arms.
North Korean loggers in the Russian Far East have been neither armed nor uniformed. Small numbers of North Korean laborers are thought to have fought in the Chechen wars as mercenaries under Russian command.
Another specialist is convinced that the North Koreans in Russia are combat troops.
“They are not labor forces. You don’t need labor forces to be armed with gear,” said Yang Uk, a military specialist at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “I think they are actual combat units.”
Mr. Yang said he suspects North Korea is deploying three infantry brigades and a special forces brigade. South Korean intelligence said the advance parties sent to Russia are special forces.
North Korea’s 11th “Storm” Corps, personally inspected recently by Mr. Kim, fields 14 SF brigades: 10 army, two airborne and two amphibious, Mr. Yang said.
He said these brigades are more akin to U.S. Army Rangers than smaller, Tier-1 SF such as Delta and SEAL Team 6. Rangers, trained as shock troops, are unsuited to defensive duties or border guarding, though regular North Korean infantry could undertake those roles.
Mr. Yang speculated that their likeliest area of operations would be the area captured by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk oblast.
Last week, a Russian state TV pundit said the North Korean deployment will likely be “not on the territory that the West considers the Ukrainian land occupied by us, but on the classical canonical territory of the Russian Federation.”
The Kyiv Independent, which has led many reports of Russian troops in Ukraine, cited Ukrainian intelligence as saying North Korean troops were identified near the Kursk front last week.
South Korea’s dilemma
The North Korean military is breaking new ground. It has never undertaken a major expeditionary mission. For South Korea, memories are being resurrected.
South Korea sent 320,000 troops to fight alongside the doomed U.S. defense of South Vietnam, and South Korean businesses profited massively as contractors in the war-torn country.
Seoul is estimated to have earned nearly $1 billion in U.S. currency over nine years of war. It was a massive foreign exchange injection for what has since become a world-class industrial powerhouse.
Pyongyang is “hoping for something similar to the considerable economic and military gains that South Korea received for sending troops to Vietnam,” Doo Jin-ho, a Russia expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, told the Hankyoreh newspaper.
If North Korean troops receive pay of Russian volunteers — $3,000 to $5,000 per month — it would be “a huge boost for the North Korean economy,” Mr. Doo said.
Fighting for Moscow will also secure Russian support for Pyongyang in any peninsula contingency, he said.
South Korea’s response to these far-reaching developments has been muted.
On the diplomatic front, Seoul last week summoned the Russian ambassador for a dressing-down. On Friday, Seoul spoke out regarding the Moscow-Pyongyang strategic partnership.
“The government expresses grave concerns that Russia is proceeding with the ratification of the Russia-North Korea treaty in the midst of the North’s deployment of its troops to Russia,” a government official told news agency Yonhap.
A debate is underway over whether Seoul should reverse its policy of not arming combatant nations and start supplying weaponry directly to Kyiv.
Mr. Yoon told a Thursday briefing: “While we have maintained our principle of not directly supplying lethal weapons, we can also review our stance more flexibly, depending on the level of North Korean military activities.”
The war has boosted South Korea’s powerful arms industry, which sells tens of billions of dollars worth of hardware, including tanks, self-propelled artillery and tactical rocket systems, to NATO nations and other democracies.
In addition to arming Ukraine, South Korea could apply an economic squeeze on Russia.
Jeffrey Robertson, who teaches diplomatic studies at Seoul’s Yonsei University, said that while Korea Inc.’s shipments to Russia have been cut back since the Ukraine war began, exports to Central Asia that offer economic backdoor links to Russia have soared.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Pyongyang watcher Lee Sung-yoon, a biographer of Kim Jong-un’s sister.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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