Pyongyang is about to send troops into combat on European soil. Its arch foes see the danger, and are responding accordingly.

Nov 3, 2024

Samuel Ramani

Who would have believed when Ukraine was invaded that, almost three years on, North Korean troops would be fighting on European soil? Yet, here we are, with Pjongjang now a full-fledged participant in Russia’s war, largely thanks to the West’s failure to deter. The US now estimates that 10,000 North Korean troops are stationed in Russia and 8,000 of those forces will be imminently deployed to the battlefront. After meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Friday, North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui vowed to “stand alongside our Russian comrades” until Russia’s “day of victory” in Ukraine.

Despite the scale of North Korea’s force contingent and the likelihood of further deployments, complacency abounds in Western capitals. After news of the arrival of North Korean troops broke, Britain’s mission to the UN posted a statement on social media with following caption “Putin is clearly desperate. His desperation is a danger to us all.” Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte echoed these comments.

I was struck by this hubris, which contrasts markedly with the alarm expressed by South Korean experts and officials I have engaged with in recent weeks. My read of the situation aligns much more closely with the view in Seoul: the arrival of North Korean forces should spur the West towards firmer action.

While Russia’s army has experienced staggering rates of attrition, its personnel deficits are less acute than Ukraine’s in this phase of the war. Ukraine’s plans to draft 160,000 new soldiers, which follows legislation mandating all men aged 25 to 60 to register on an electronic enlistment database, exemplifies this reality. So Russia’s use of North Korean troops is a tactical gambit rather than desperation. It is concentrating North Korean forces in Kursk, where it is on the defensive, so it can keep pressing its advantage on the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia axes of the frontline.

The trope that North Korean forces are going to provide little offensive value also does not stand up to scrutiny. Half of the shells that Russia uses on the battlefield are of North Korean origin. Its technical advisors could enhance the interoperability of Hwasong-11 missiles with Russia’s Iranian-modelled Geran-2 drones, as Pyongyang and Tehran also have long-standing military ties.

Despite much-publicised recordings of racial slurs by Russian forces towards North Korean troops and linguistic barriers, North Korea has significant foreign combat experience to draw upon. The North Korean-trained Zimbabwean fifth brigade helped dictator Robert Mugabe repress dissent in the 1980s and North Korean forces also allegedly aided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s conquest of Aleppo in 2016. While North Korea has not participated in a conventional war of Ukraine’s intensity since the Korean War ended in 1953, its troops are unlikely to be overawed by their surroundings.

Fearing Russia’s potential tit-for-tat assistance to North Korea’s nuclear programs, Seoul could take matters into its own hands. Assuming it scraps legislation barring it from exporting arms to conflict zones, South Korea could unload some of its estimated 3.4 million 105mm artillery shells to Ukraine. South Korea also possesses Tomahawk-style cruise missiles, which are coveted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

As Russia’s deployment of North Korean forces is an asymmetric retaliation for Ukraine’s offensive on Kursk and strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, the West needs to stand with South Korea in calling Putin’s bluff. Lifting bans on Kyiv’s ability to strike Russian targets with Nato-class weapons is the least the West can do.

Russia is determined to prevail in Ukraine by any means. The West needs to shed its complacency and get serious.

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Dr Samuel Ramani is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute