DEEP DIVE — North Korea’s deployment of thousands of troops to Russia – presumably for use in the war against Ukraine – has stunned policymakers and experts around the world. Even those who were already sounding the alarm over the North’s military aid to Moscow.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in Rome for a NATO defense ministers meeting, confirmed the bombshell Wednesday. "There is evidence that there are DPRK troops in Russia," Austin said, using the acronym for Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He called the deployment “very, very serious.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that U.S. intelligence had concluded that “at least” 3,000 North Korean troops had arrived at military bases inside Russia and were undergoing basic combat training. “We do not yet know whether these soldiers will enter into combat alongside the Russian military,” Kirby said, “but this is certainly a highly concerning probability.” South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) gave a higher figure and more detail, saying that North Korea was sending 12,000 soldiers to the war in Ukraine, and that Russian navy ships had transported 1,500 North Korean special operations forces to Russia’s Far East port of Vladivostok in early October for training at military bases.
The news represents a game-changing moment in the conflict. Assuming North Korean troops show up in Ukraine, it would mark the first time a third country’s forces were on the ground in the nearly three-year-old war.
Ukraine’s western allies responded with warnings. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, visiting Ukraine just before the reports were confirmed, said the involvement of North Korean soldiers “would be serious and push the conflict into a new stage, an escalatory stage.” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte posted on X that North Korean troops fighting with Russia in Ukraine “would mark a significant escalation.” And South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called the deployment “a provocation that threatens global security beyond the Korean Peninsula and Europe.”
As for Ukraine itself, President Volodymyr Zelensky, delivering his weekly television address Tuesday, pleaded with his allies to find ways to deter Pyongyang: “Do not shy away from this challenge…If North Korea can intervene in the war in Europe, then the pressure on this regime is definitely not strong enough.”
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. and allied intelligence have tried to keep a sharp eye on any nation willing to defy international rules and supply Moscow with weapons. North Korea was an early suspect, and only a few weeks ago, CIA Director William Burns warned of the depth of the North’s partnership with Moscow.
“The North Koreans [are] supplying significant quantities of artillery munitions for Russia, desperately needed by the Russians on the battlefield,” Burns said on October 7, at The Cipher Brief’s 2024 Threat Conference. “Short-range ballistic missiles as well. And of course the challenge is, this is a two-way street, because the North Koreans benefit as well from this. [This is] something we watch very carefully.”
Shortly after Burns made those comments, the first North Korean soldiers were apparently sailing for Russia’s Far East.
“I think this means that we have to stop thinking of North Korea as just an isolated rogue threat, and start thinking of the country as an international collaborator that could cause harm to the broader international community,” Dr. Naoko Aoki, a political scientist at RAND, a research institution based in Washington, told The Cipher Brief.
What the North Korean troops might do
U.S. officials say the facts surrounding the North Korean deployment remain murky.
"What exactly are they doing?” Secretary Austin said Wednesday. “Left to be seen. These are things that we need to sort out.” He and other U.S. officials cast the North Korean troop movements as a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin is desperate. “This is an indication that he may be even in more trouble than most people realize,” Austin said.
That may be true. U.S. officials have assessed that Russia is recruiting between 25,000-30,000 troops per month – an impressive-sounding number but one that may barely keep up with the numbers of Russian dead and wounded in the war. The latest U.S. intelligence assessment is that the Russian military has taken 530,000 casualties, counting both killed and wounded, since it invaded Ukraine. And Putin is believed to be determined to avoid any further large-scale mobilization of his citizens.
Beyond some modest relief for Russia’s manpower issues, experts doubt that the arrival of troops from North Korea would have much impact on the battlefield. Given the scale of the war, 3,000 fresh soldiers – or even the higher estimate of 12,000 – are unlikely to make a big difference. And while the South Korean intelligence reports said that some of the North Korean forces now in Russia are elite special operations troops, Kirby noted that even if that were true, few if any North Korean soldiers have seen real combat, know how to use Russian weapons, have trained with Russians or can even speak the language.
“We don't really know what [the North Korean troops] are going to be used for, if they’re going to deploy, where they’re going to deploy and to what purpose,” Kirby said. “I can tell you one thing. If they do deploy to fight against Ukraine, they’re fair game, they’re fair targets.”
Meanwhile, there may be benefits in store for the North Korean military. RAND’s Dr. Aoki said that committing troops to fight with Russia in Ukraine could offer Pyongyang several advantages, including combat experience for an army that hasn’t fought a hot war since the 1950s, and Russian technology and assistance for its own weapons systems.
The rise of the “escalation potential”
The bigger concern, in the wake of the reports, is that the North Korean involvement is the clearest sign yet that the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be tilting into a global war.
That has been the fear in many world capitals since Putin sent his troops in, and it’s the prime reason why, to date, nations with strong interests in the outcome have limited their support to the tranches of military and financial aid that have poured in – from the U.S. and its NATO allies for Ukraine, and from Iran, China and North Korea for the Russians. That support has included billions of dollars worth of lethal weaponry – but never any units of foreign soldiers.
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, speaking in New York Wednesday, said Pyongyang’s decision “now to add personnel, and in significant numbers, is profoundly additive to the conflict, and profoundly destabilizing.”
Rudd, his country’s ambassador to Washington (though he said his comments were made in his capacity as a scholar of China), suggested that the U.S. and its allies press China to use its leverage with North Korea — because “the escalation potential that is unfolding here is not in China’s interest, or anyone else’s, other than Vladimir Putin’s.”
To some, that “escalation potential” is a reminder of the worst conflicts of the 20th century, and the moments when third-country forces first entered those wars. And it raises concerns that other nations might now feel moved to enter the fray. France and Poland have previously floated the idea of sending outside troops to Ukraine. And one country in Asia issued a veiled threat Wednesday to do the same.
South Korea’s president said the country “won’t sit idle,” and the government summoned the Russian ambassador in Seoul to denounce the potential deployments and demand the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops from Russia. South Korea’s vice-foreign minister Kim Hong-kyun warned the ambassador, Georgiy Zinoviev, that Seoul will “respond with all measures available,” and South Korea’s Defense Ministry said that it would consider sending lethal military aid to Ukraine with “an open attitude.”
That’s a sharp shift for a country that has provided only humanitarian aid to Kyiv since Russia’s 2022 invasion. South Korean media are suggesting that Seoul could go so far as to send its own military and intelligence personnel to Ukraine itself, to provide Kyiv with information about North Korean military strategies and operations and help provide interpretation services if North Korean soldiers are captured.
It was exactly the sort of message that has experts and world leaders worried about a domino effect, and a tiptoeing to a wider war.
The China factor
For decades, China has been North Korea’s closest – and sometimes lone – ally on the world stage. It has also been cementing a strategic partnership with Russia over the last three years, while trying simultaneously to cast itself as a potential peacemaker in the Ukraine war.
All that has analysts and diplomats wondering how the North Korean deployment is being received in Beijing.
As Rudd, the Australian ambassador, said, China has no interest in an escalation in Ukraine. While China has supported Russia by sending component parts for weapons and other technical aid to help Russia work around Western sanctions, it has stopped short of full-blown military support. And while Kim Jong Un may see his burgeoning alliance with Moscow as the path to more power and international prestige, China may not wish to see its own longtime strategic relationship with North Korea overtaken by the Russians.
“This [troop movement] makes the DPRK the most visible and committed supporter of Russia’s aggression in Europe,” Dr. Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote in an online article posted Wednesday. “Indeed, Pyongyang has put most of its chips in the Russian basket for now rather than China.”
Recent studies have shown that North Korea’s trade with China has diminished, while trade with Russia appears to be flourishing, Cha said. He argued that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be cultivating Moscow in the hopes of gaining access to advanced missile technology and building North Korea into an unparalleled strategic threat to the U.S. and its allies.
“North Korea probably calculates that closer military ties with Russia will benefit its longer-term strategic goals, which include ensuring the survival of the Kim family regime and maintaining and preferably increasing the country’s influence on the Korean Peninsula,” Dr. Aoki said. “In this sense, North Korea may see the military relationship with Russia as an opportunity to forge closer security ties with China as well, to counter U.S.-Japan-South Korea cooperation.”
As for the North Korean leader himself, “He's gotten a really big head now,” said Dr. Duyeon Kim, a senior fellow with the Indo-Pacific Security Program in the Seoul office of the Center for a New American Security.
“Since the very beginning of North Korea's existence it was always the junior partner and it needed Russia's permission…for everything, even permission to even invade South Korea,” she said on a CSIS podcast for the think tank’s Korea program. “Now the tables have turned and [North Korea’s] big-power patron is asking small country North Korea for help on one of the biggest wars that Russia is fighting right now. And so you can imagine how excited and how much of an ego boost really this is for Kim Jong Un. But at the same time, I would suspect that Putin and Kim Jong Un are both making really hard and cold calculations when it comes to this relationship.”
As the consequences of those calculations play out, the mentions of a potential “World War III” multiply.
“It sounds alarmist to say that we are in the Third World War right now,” Cipher Brief expert David Marlowe, former CIA Deputy Director for Operations, said at The Cipher Brief Threat Conference, “but the opposite part of that is not paying attention, and realizing we've lost the Third World War because we didn't recognize it as it was happening.”
Marlowe made that statement two weeks before the news of the North Korean troop movement was confirmed.
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