South Korea: North Korean Soldiers Now Training In Russia To Support Invasion Of Ukraine
South Korea’s national intelligence agency said on Friday that North Korea is now directly involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine following the arrival of a first batch of North Korean soldiers in Russia for training, with the soldiers to be deployed in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine afterwards.
In a statement, the National Intelligence Service said it had detected four landing ships and three escort ships of the Russian Pacific Fleet enter North Korean waters from October 8 to October 13, with the ships transporting around 1,500 North Korean special forces soldiers from areas near the cities of Chongjin, Hamhung and Musudan to Vladivostok. The NIS added that it expected a second round of sealifts to begin soon, noting that Russian strategic airlifters like the Antonov An-124 have also been detected flying between Vladivostok and Pyongyang.
The NIS also released commercial satellite imagery of what it said were North Korean soldiers at Russian military training facilities around the cities of Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk in the Russian Far East.
According to the NIS, North Korean troops have been issued with standard Russian uniforms, equipment, and weapons, as well as falsified Russian identity documents identifying them as ethnic Buryats or Sakhas from Siberia.
A source in the NIS that spoke to the Yonhap news service said that Pyongyang is expected to commit as many as 12,000 soldiers in total, including members of the North Korean military’s best units.
The NIS statement follows claims by Ukraine’s government that North Korean troops have already been seen in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine. On Thursday, President Volodmyr Zelensky claimed that Pyongyang was in the process of sending 10,000 North Korean soldiers to support the Russian invasion. During a press conference in Brussels, he added that the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine had found that an unknown number of North Korean officers are already embedded with Russian military units occupying Ukrainian territory, describing the North Korean presence as “the first step to a world war”.
Shortly after Zelensky’s comments, Defense Intelligence of Ukraine chief Krylo Budanov told The War Zone that he expected the first North Korean troops to be ready for deployment with Russian forces by November 1, with an initial deployment of 2,600 troops to be sent to Kursk to engage Ukrainian forces that have been there since August.
During a press conference NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said “our official position is that we cannot confirm reports that North Koreans are actively now as soldiers engaged in the war effort. But this, of course, might change.” Rutte went on to note that “even if North Korea is not physically there at the battlefield, then still they are helping to fuel Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in every way they can.”