Almost 200 North Korean defectors are willing to join Ukraine’s fight against Russia as North Korean troops come close to the frontlines of fighting in southern Russia, according to a new report.
“We are all military veterans who understand North Korea’s military culture and psychological state better than anyone else,” a North Korean defector, 69-year-old Ahn Chan-il, told the South China Morning Post‘s This Week in Asia in an article published on Monday.
Members of the group of defectors all have several years of military experience, according to the report. Pyongyang has mandatory military service, which can last around a decade for men, and has a huge army of well over a million.
Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence has said in recent weeks that North Korea was sending between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to Russia to bolster Moscow’s war effort against Kyiv.
North Korean military officers march during a welcoming ceremony, on June 19 in Pyongyang. Almost 200 North Korean defectors are willing to join Ukraine’s fight against Russia as North Korean troops come close to the frontlines of fighting in southern Russia, according to a new report.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that he had told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were on “Russian training grounds in the immediate vicinity of the war zone.”
Kyiv’s GUR military intelligence service said on Thursday that it had detected North Korean troops in the Russian border region of Kursk for the first time the previous day.
Ukraine launched an incursion into the region nearly three months ago, which Russia initially struggled to peel back. Moscow hasn’t yet succeeded in pushing Kyiv’s control back to the border.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Monday that North Korean units had been deployed to Kursk. The Pentagon separately said that the about 10,000 North Korean soldiers training in eastern Russia “will probably augment Russian forces near Ukraine over the next several weeks.”
“A portion of those soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a briefing on Monday. The U.S. is “increasingly concerned” that they will be deployed against Ukraine in Kursk, Singh said.
Western and South Korean officials have widely condemned the move, describing the transfer of the forces to Russia as a dangerous and worrying escalation to the war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.
A Ukrainian government-backed hotline, designed for Russian soldiers wishing to surrender as prisoners of war, published an appeal last week for North Korean soldiers to “not die senselessly on foreign soil.”
Lee Min-bok, a fellow defector, has reportedly appealed to Kyiv for permission to help rescue North Korean soldiers. Seoul’s spy agency said this month that the North Korean soldiers had been given Russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and fake documents claiming the fighters were residents of regions in Siberia.
“It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed to the battlefield,” the agency said.
Footage published online by Russian and Ukrainian sources appeared to show North Korean soldiers at a Russian training ground in the far-eastern Primorsky region, which borders North Korean territory.
“We’re ready to go wherever needed to work as psychological warfare agents—through loudspeaker broadcasts, distributing leaflets, and even acting as interpreters,” Ahn said.
Relations on the Korean peninsula are at their worst point in decades, with Pyongyang formally renouncing the goal of reunification with the south and dubbing Seoul the “principal enemy.”
Flashpoints of tension such as trash-filled balloons gliding over the de-facto border and loudspeakers blasting across the demilitarized zone have dotted the past few months of spiky relations.
Seoul has been deeply worried by Pyongyang’s growing friendship with Moscow, and whether Russia is helping North Korea develop its nuclear and conventional weapons programs in exchange for munitions and missiles for Moscow’s use against Ukraine.
North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui left on Monday for a visit to Russia, the secretive country’s state KCNA news agency reported.
