Two global alliances may soon be directly engaged against each other
Sometime between October 8 and 13, seven ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet sailed from Chongjin, Hamhung and Musudan in North Korea, to Vladivostok, Russia. Aboard were 1,500 North Korean special forces soldiers.
They’re the vanguard of an initial force of potentially 11,000 North Korean troops that’s set to reinforce Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. And they’re the latest and most chilling reminder that the war isn’t just between Russia and Ukraine.
The line has been crossed and third-party troops will soon be on the ground. Other nations on both sides may follow suit: such action has already been suggested by British and French politicians. It’s now a global war, potentially a world war. It’s clear Russian leaders, and their allies in Iran, North Korea and – to a lesser extent – China understand the stakes. It’s less clear that Ukraine’s allies in Nato understand it.
Those 1,500 North Korean commandos aren’t Pyongyang’s first contribution to Russia’s war effort. North Korea has also sold artillery ammunition, KN-23 ballistic missiles and anti-tank missile vehicles to Russia. Alongside Iran, North Korea is Russia’s industrial backer – and the main reason the Russian armed forces haven’t already run out of critical equipment as their wider war grinds into its 32nd costly month.
But in sending men in addition to weapons, Pyongyang is making overt what was, before now, largely covert. And it’s helping to solve one of Russia’s most serious wartime problems: a growing manpower shortage. The Russian military has been losing more than a thousand people a day killed and wounded on average for around a year now. At the same time, the Kremlin has been able to recruit around 30,000 fresh troops a month.
The difference between losses and recruitment amounts to a steadily growing troop deficit. The Russian government could add a special draft to its usual annual conscription, but that’s so politically toxic that even the autocratic regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin is reluctant to order it.
Replacement troops have to come from somewhere. That somewhere, it seems, is North Korea.
That doesn’t mean those 1,500 North Korean special forces, or the 9,500 additional North Korean troops following behind them, are going to man the trenches along the 700-mile front line of the wider war. It seems more likely that, at first, they’ll play a support role behind the line.
But that’s a distinction without a meaningful difference, as 11,000 North Korea support troops could free up 11,000 Russians to fight as infantry. Of course, 11,000 extra troops is barely two weeks’ worth at Russia’s current casualty rate. That raises an ominous prospect: that many more North Koreans might be coming.
North Korea’s growing role in the Russia-Ukraine war threatens to draw South Korea into the conflict, too. While South Korea already supports Ukraine with humanitarian aid – and reportedly sold the United States a million artillery shells for onward transfer to Ukraine – Seoul has been reluctant to ship weaponry directly to Kyiv.
That could change. In an emergency National Security Council meeting this week, top South Korean officials described North Korean support for Russia’s war effort “a grave security threat,” and vowed to escalate their own involvement in Ukraine in response.
South Korea builds many of the world’s best weapons – in particular, tanks and artillery. It might not be long before we see those weapons on the front line in Ukraine. But do Ukraine’s allies in Nato appreciate the war’s escalation the way South Korea does?
There’s been some slippage in foreign support for Ukraine at precisely the moment Ukraine needs more support, not less. The Ukrainian military recently formed 14 new brigades together representing a 10-percent increase in its ground combat force structure. But a slowdown in foreign assistance means 10 of the brigades lack heavy equipment, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed.
Maybe South Korean assistance will close the gap. But Kyiv shouldn’t have to arrange its strategy around the reality that South Korea appreciates the implications of an increasingly global war more than Nato countries do.
