According to different sources, between 3,000 and 10,000 soldiers of Pyongyang’s army are currently training before potentially joining the Russian ranks in the coming weeks.
A fear about to become reality? On October 13, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that North Korea was providing soldiers to the Russian army to carry out its invasion of Ukraine, in addition to delivering ammunition and weapons. The information emanating from kyiv, but also from Seoul, was immediately denied by Moscow.
Despite Russian denials, sources close to Ukrainian intelligence assured the BBC and the Politico media that a battalion of “around 3,000 men” was currently training secretly to fight against Ukraine and that Pyongyang would enter “fully” at war, the latter having to join the Russian ranks in the coming weeks.
“Bataillon bouriate”
“We call them the Buryat battalion,” a source explains to Politico. Buryatia is a region of Russia, quite remote and close to the border with Mongolia, in which many recruitments for the Russian army take place. It is in this area that North Korean soldiers, who according to the Kyiv Independent are in reality 10,000, participate in their training.
“We see a growing alliance between Russia and regimes like North Korea. It’s no longer just about the transfer of weapons. It’s about sending people from North Korea into the armed forces of the occupier,” declared Volodymyr Zelensky in his daily allowance of October 13.
If these soldiers are actually deployed, probably in the Kursk area where the fighting is most intense, they would then join the several dozen North Korean technicians already sent to the front to help deploy exported weapons, including KN ballistic missiles -23.
However, if they participate in the fighting under the Russian flag, then North Korea would avoid becoming a co-belligerent in the conflict itself.
Strengthened links
Nuclear-armed North Korea has strengthened its military ties with Moscow in recent months and Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to Pyongyang in June to sign a mutual defense agreement with the North’s leader. Korean Kim Jong Un.
A Ukrainian media outlet claimed last weekend that six North Korean officers died in a Ukrainian missile attack days earlier near Donetsk, in Moscow-occupied eastern Ukraine.
Andriï Kovalenko, an official of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, clarified on Telegram that the North Korean soldiers engaged in Ukraine “are limited to a small number of engineering troops”.
These forces “monitor the use of (North Korean) munitions by the Russian army,” he added, asserting that “Russia is increasingly dependent on North Korean munitions for different types of weapons.” “.
South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, for his part, declared on Tuesday that Seoul considered it “very likely that there were casualties among North Korean officers and soldiers in Ukraine”, even saying that even expect other troops to be sent as reinforcements alongside the Russians.
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