Japan Institute for National Fundamentals

　
North Korean forces’ participation in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has been confirmed by the Ukrainian and South Korean governments. On October 17, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces were preparing to mobilize 10,000 North Korean soldiers. On October 18, the Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security under the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy released a video claimed as showing that North Korean soldiers were receiving equipment at a training ground in Russia’s Far East. On the same day, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service announced that North Korea had decided to dispatch about 12,000 special operation forces of the 11th Corps to Russia and that about 1,500 among them were transferred to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East on Russian Navy transport ships between October 8 and 13.

10,000 troops to be dispatched by year-end

In my June 24 “Speaking Out” essay titled “North Korea Has Sent Military Engineers for Ukraine War,” based on information from inside North Korea, I wrote that North Korean forces were expected to take part in the Ukraine war; that about 1,000 military engineers were sent to Russia in May, leading to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea in June; and that North Korea was selecting soldiers with good physique under a plan to increase the number of North Korean soldiers dispatched to Russia to 10,000.

According to information I obtained since then, the first batch of 1,500 soldiers or three battalions was sent to Russia in early May and the second batch of 1,500 in August. As of early October, the third batch of about 5,000 soldiers had been selected and was on standby. A total of about 10,000 soldiers will be dispatched by the end of this year, my sources said. The first and second groups have been dressed in plain clothes, working on construction in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, without participating in the fighting. Russia pays $1,500-2,000 per soldier every month. Basically, the money is given not to the soldiers but to Pyongyang.

Apart from soldiers, Pyongyang since the outbreak of the war has sent military officers to learn how Russian forces fight, expecting to apply Russian tactics to North Korean forces.

Planning to put North Koreans into battle?

If my information mentioned above is correct, the 1,500 soldiers confirmed by South Korea as transferred to Vladivostok may be part of the third batch. In the footage of the training ground in the Far East, they were provided with Russian military uniforms, indicating that they may be assigned to different missions from working on construction in plain clothes. Russia may be planning to put North Korean soldiers disguised as Russian into battle.

Last year, North Korea considered but cancelled a plan to send special forces to Russia after a secret survey of soldiers found that many of them could flee during the fighting, I was told. My sources say if North Korean soldiers are thrown into a deadly battle, there should certainly be a large-scale desertion. Ukrainian media have already carried information that 18 North Korean soldiers deployed in the Bryansk and Kursk regions in western Russia had escaped.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is said to be in a hurry to obtain advanced weapons such as nuclear submarines, stealth fighter jets, hypersonic glide vehicles, and military satellites, or their technologies, from Russia before a truce in the Ukraine war. As Russia only exchanges equivalents with North Korea, Moscow is reluctant to provide advanced weapons except for military satellites it has handed over to Pyongyang. Kim is trying to obtain advanced weapons with money he gets in exchange for his soldiers’ lives.

Tsutomu Nishioka is a senior fellow and a Planning Committee member at the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals and a specially-appointed professor at Reitaku University. He covers South and North Koreas.