NEWSWEEK |
Published November 1, 2024
With thousands of North Korean troops deployed to Russia for likely action against Ukraine, there are looming questions over how well the fighters, who lack combat experience, will perform.
It is unclear how many casualties Pyongyang’s forces will sustain and just how many of the country’s elite soldiers North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be willing to involve in the bloody conflict.
Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence have 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.
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.”
South Korea’s intelligence agency said earlier this month that an initial batch of 1,500 fighters had traveled to Russia, and were kitted out with Russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and fake documents claiming the fighters were residents of regions in Siberia. More troops were expected to travel soon, the agency said in mid-October.
Washington has said they will be “legitimate military targets” and U.S. envoy to the U.N., Robert Wood, said that if North Korean troops “enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will surely return in body bags.”
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SOURCE: www.newsweek.com
RELATED: Chaos as Russia tries to absorb North Korean troops, Ukraine spies say
Published October 29, 2024
Ukraine’s spies say they intercepted phone calls showing chaos as Russia works to integrate North Korean troops into its military operations.
Some of the calls were intercepted from troops involved in defending Kursk, a region of Russia on Ukraine’s northern border where Ukrainian troops seized territory in August, according to Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Russian military assigned one translator and three Russian servicemembers to every 30 North Korean soldiers, the spy agency said it learned from the calls.
But Russian soldiers on the intercepted calls appeared doubtful that they would have enough commanders to lead the new units, or enough weapons and ammunition to arm them 979 days into Moscow’s invasion.
In one call that the spy agency said was recorded within Kursk, a Russian soldier was “outraged” at a commander who ordered troops to provide Russian armored vehicles – already in short supply – to the newly arrived North Korean troops.
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SOURCE: www.usatoday.com
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