This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
North Korea is accelerating preparations to send more troops to Russia amid an increasing number of casualties, South Korea said on Friday, while Ukraine said the North’s additional support would mainly include missile and artillery troops.
About 4,000 of the up to 12,000 North Korean troops dispatched to Russia’s Kursk region to help it in its war against Ukraine have been killed or wounded, according to Ukraine on Wednesday.
“It is estimated that the North Korean military is accelerating follow-up measures and preparations for additional troop deployments amid an increasing number of the casualties and prisoners of war that occurred four months into the Russian-Ukrainian war,” said South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, on Friday, without elaborating.
The JSC said in December that it believed the North was preparing to send “suicide drones” to Russia alongside additional troops, aimed to modernize its conventional forces, which are qualitatively inferior to those of South Korea, by using the war as an opportunity to consume old forces and ensure new ones gain combat experience.
Separately, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief also said North Korea was expected to send reinforcements to Kursk and it would mostly be missile and artillery troops, defense and security publication The War Zone reported.
The War Zone cited Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency, as saying the North would also send more of the KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles that it had already provided to Moscow, and the North Koreans would train Russians on all of those systems.
Budanov added that he didn’t know how many new troops would be coming or when they would arrive, but The New York Times, citing an unidentified U.S. defence official, reported on Wednesday that North Korean reinforcements were expected in Kursk “within the next two months.”
Barbs at UN
Russia and North Korea once again declined to confirm or deny the North’s troop deployment to Kursk.
When criticized over deepening military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang at a disarmament conference at the U.N. Office in Geneva on Thursday, Russian envoy Andrey Belyousov said: “On the Korean Peninsula, South Korea, the United States, and Western allies are trying to portray themselves as protectors of peace, but this is contradictory to reality.”
He added that joint military exercises between South Korea and the U.S. on the Korean peninsula during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Pyongyang last year showed the collusion of South Korea and the United States as “potential aggressors.”
North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol also called the North’s efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities a “legitimate exercise of the right” to self-defense that was fully in accordance with the U.N. Charter.
“Our status as a fully nuclear-armed state is an undeniable and indisputable reality, regardless of whether other countries recognize it or not,” Ju added.
In response, Kim Il-hoon, South Korea’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva, said the North was making a “futile effort” to distort the cause and result of the situation on the Korean peninsula.
“The South Korea-U.S. alliance was formed as a result of North Korea’s 1950 invasion of South Korea and devastation of the Korean Peninsula … North Korea and Russia saying their military cooperation is legal is a sophistry. They are violating many principles of the U.N. Charter,” Kim added.