North Korean soldiers in Ukraine: a global threat to NATO

The question of Korean reinforcements and their presence in Russia continues to arise. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky assured Thursday, November 7 that the 11,000 soldiers who would be deployed in Russia have started fighting in the Russian region of Kursk, occupied by Ukrainian forces. A hypothesis which had been put forward by General Olivier Kempf in his weekly analysis of the conflict. He pointed there “their deployment in the Soudja pocket, for the good reason that it is in Russian territory: we would then be within the framework not only of the bilateral treaty but also of what is commonly accepted by international law”. This detachment would be based within the framework of the treaty signed between the two countries.

Trump wants to end the war

But if “some of them have already taken part in hostilities against the Ukrainian military” with “losses which have already been recorded” says the Ukrainian leader, what impact could this have on the future of the war? In the meantime, NATO and its partners in Asia (South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) have “firmly” condemned North Korea's engagement on Friday. “The deployment of thousands of fighters constitutes a dangerous intensification of the already substantial support provided by this country to the war of aggression that Russia is waging, completely illegally, against Ukraine.declared the Atlantic Alliance in a press release.

This repeated support from NATO for Ukraine comes in the context of Donald Trump's victory in the United States. On the war in Ukraine, the American billionaire has continued to promise a break with his predecessor Joe Biden and to stop the war “in twenty-four hours”without however giving details. Several hypotheses have been put forward: the freezing of positions on the ground, the transfer of occupied Ukrainian territories, the suspension of NATO expansion and the creation of a demilitarized zone.

Faced with the return of the former Republican president to the White House on January 20, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said he wanted to meet him as quickly as possible to discuss this commitment by North Korea, which constitutes, according to him, a threat not only to Europe, but also to the United States. North Korea's role “illustrates how these countries work together, China, North Korea, Russia and, of course, Iran”he hammered as if to depict a new axis of evil.