Outmanned, outgunned, exhausted, Ukrainian troops are stretched to the breaking point by a Russian Army willing and able to throw more men and more weaponry to overrun Kyiv’s defenses.
Now enter the North Koreans: more than 11,000 soldiers sent to Russia, a deployment that poses a serious risk to Ukrainian lines, with the potential to break through in one location or cause a cascade of losses.
With estimates of Russian casualties exceeding 600,000 and the Kremlin desperate to avoid a politically unpopular second mobilization, the introduction of North Korean troops may end up being exactly what Moscow needs to, among other things, end Ukraine’s embarrassing seizure of Russian territory in the Kursk region.
Andriy Kovalenko, who sits on Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council, said Ukrainian forces had already clashed with North Korean units fighting alongside Russian troops near Sudzha, a Kursk region town, though he did not specify when the fighting occurred.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts of small Russian infantry teams and lightly armored vehicle assaults against [Ukrainian forces] right now,” said Dara Massicot, an expert on Russia’s military at the Carnegie Endowment for the International Peace. “Adding [North Korea] to that chaotic and taxing mix to areas like Kursk will strain [Ukraine’s] operations.”
South Korea’s intelligence agency, and later U.S. authorities, said that 3,000 North Korean troops had arrived at Russian training bases in early October, and as many as 12,000 soldiers — approximately four brigades’ worth — could ultimately be deployed to the Ukraine conflict. A top Ukrainian diplomat said the deployment was being commanded by three generals and about 500 officers.
Still, there are questions about the fighting ability of the North Koreans and what effect their presence will have on the battlefield.
North Korea’s army “has poor equipment, lacks needed resources for training, is underfed, and is often used as labor for construction projects and bringing in the fall harvest,” said Terence Roehrig, an expert at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.
“Most of the North Koreans likely do not speak Russian, and they do not have actual combat experience yet,” said Benjamin Young, who researches North Korea at the Rand Corporation. “They are also operating within a highly corrupt and undisciplined Russian military system. The North Koreans will not be used to the lack of discipline and regimentation among Russian conscripts.”
Buckling, Not (Yet) Broken
On the front lines themselves, Ukrainian lines are already buckling against the onslaught of Russia’s offensives. After stunning Moscow by invading and seizing parts of the Kursk region, Ukrainian units are being pushed back and have lost nearly half of the total territory they initially captured.
To the southeast, the city of Kupyansk, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, is under serious threat after Russia cut Ukrainian defenses at the Oskil River in two. Russian forces are also pushing into the center of the height-of-land town of Chasiv Yar after crossing the Siverskiy Donets-Donbas canal in August.
Farther south, Russian troops are closing in on Pokrovsk, a major logistical hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, having seized the town of Vuhledar last month and creeping toward a major highway.
Ukraine’s most recent struggles have stemmed in part from the slow supply of critical Western weaponry – Abrams M-1 tanks and ATACMS precision missiles, for example. Equally critical has been Kyiv’s inability to ramp up its recruiting and training efforts to replenish depleted and exhausted frontline units.
For its part, Russia has been able to keep pace with its eye-watering casualties with a steady supply of volunteers attracted by extraordinarily high wages and benefits. South Korean intelligence reports Russia will pay around $2,000 a month per soldier, though most of that is likely to go to the North Korean government.
It’s “a significant commitment by North Korea and a serious escalation in the war,” Roehrig said. However, “these numbers will not be decisive on the battlefield. Given the reported current casualty rates of 1,000 casualties per day, the Russian military will burn through the North Korean force in one to two weeks.”
More worrisome for Ukraine, however, are South Korean intelligence reports saying the deployed troops include elite, special forces soldiers from North Korea’s XI Corps, also known as the Storm Corps.
“These elite units are believed to be well-trained with better equipment that would be a more formidable force than many other elements of the North Korea military,” Roehrig said.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said the North Korean troops had been dubbed “special Buryats” — a reference to an ethnic minority from the Asian part of Russia — and had been equipped with mortars, sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles, night-vision goggles, and other gear.
Intelligence reports indicated the North Korean troops were physically capable but needed to be trained in up-to-date tactics, said Park Sun-won, a South Korean lawmaker, on October 23.
“Russian instructors believe that North Korean soldiers are fit both physically and mentally, but they lack the understanding of modern warfare, such as drone attacks,” Park was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as saying.
The North Koreans might also be ordered not into combat but in a supporting role, some observers said.
“Russian logistics are notoriously bad, and additional personnel might help. Combat support roles like drone operations are possible. North Korean special operations forces might train Russian special forces and replacements,” Mark Cancian and Chris Park, experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. said in a research note. “In whatever role, substituting North Koreans would free up Russian personnel for frontline service.”
‘It Makes A Difference’
Even if the fighting quality of the North Korean troops is suspect, the sheer quantity will pose a challenge — not unlike the presence of Russian prison inmates, who have been heavily used for infantry-wave-style assaults that overwhelm Ukrainian units.
“Let’s assume Ukraine has 25,000 people in Kursk. If you put there 10,000 Koreans on top of 30,000-40,000 Russians, then, yeah, it makes a difference,” said a Ukrainian Army reserve officer who uses the call sign Tatarigami.
“They can use them to exhaust our troops,” he told RFE/RL.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, have all but threatened North Korea outright.
“Make no mistake: If these North Korean troops engage in combat or combat support operations against Ukraine, they would make themselves legitimate military targets,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last week during a joint appearance in Washington with top South Korean officials.
That has already happened, Kovalenko said on November 6.
“North Koreans are gradually joining Russian units,” he told Current Time. “They are being trained to operate drones. The North Korean officers present are learning how to interact with the military in the conditions of a modern war, and just the military realities of a modern war.”
Jonas Ohman, a Swedish filmmaker who runs Blue/Yellow, a Lithuanian-based NGO that works closely with frontline Ukrainian units, said his contacts reported a clash sometime around October 25 in the Kursk region with numerous North Korean casualties. He shared a photograph from a Ukrainian drone video feed that showed a dead soldier with a North Korean flag on the helmet.
Residents sit near a shelter where they were hiding during recent fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Russia’s Kursk region. The poster reads: “Civilians in the basement, no soldiers.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy used the appearance of the North Koreans to vent frustration with restraints on using Western weaponry to hit deeper into Russia.
“We see an increase in North Korean forces, but, unfortunately, we do not see an increase in response from our partners,” he said.
With reporting by Michael Scollon