North Korean troops are ‘engaged in combat operations’ alongside Russian soldiers in the Russian region of Kursk, the United States confirmed on Tuesday, corroborating kyiv’s accusations. The region is partly occupied by Ukrainian forces.
“I can confirm that more than 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to Russia, most of them arriving in the Kursk region, where they began engaging in combat operations with Russian forces,” he said. said US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel on Tuesday.
According to kyiv, 11,000 North Korean soldiers are already deployed in Russia and have started fighting against Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region where the latter have been on the offensive since August. This deployment greatly worries Western countries which support Ukraine.
At the end of October, American Defense Minister Lloyd Austin called on North Korea to ‘withdraw its troops from Russia’ while the deputy American ambassador to the UN warned that North Korean soldiers would leave ‘necessarily in bags’ mortuaries’ if they entered Ukraine to support Russia.
Artillery, drones and infantry
“We are incredibly concerned about Russia’s decision to turn to North Korea to provide soldiers to continue its brutal war against Ukraine,” Vedant Patel added on Tuesday. He said Moscow trained North Korean soldiers in artillery, the use of drones and basic infantry operations.
‘Russia’s success on the battlefield […] will depend largely on the ability of the Russians to integrate [les soldats nord-coréens] to their army’, he further said, highlighting challenges such as ‘interoperability or the language barrier’.
The Kremlin has so far evaded questions about this presence of North Korean reinforcements. But North Korea ratified a historic defense agreement with Russia on Monday, sealing their rapprochement, according to the official North Korean agency KCNA. Russian President Vladimir Putin also signed this mutual defense treaty, the Kremlin announced this weekend.
Concluded during a rare visit by Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang in June, this treaty between two of Washington’s beasts provides in particular for reciprocal ‘immediate military aid’ in the event of an attack against one of the two countries.
/ATS
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