North Korea’s Best Soldiers Are Fighting in Ukraine | Opinion

An advance unit of North Korean troops may already have been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine to fight for Russia, South Korea’s Defense Intelligence Agency announced today. The DIA also said the soldiers appear to be headed to the Kursk border region. Ukraine’s forces are inside Russia in that area.
This is not the first time North Korean troops have been on the battlefield. “Small elements of the North Korean military were operating alongside the Russians in Ukraine as far back as a year ago,” Brandon Weichert, author of the just released A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine, told me this week.
Ukraine has already reported that six North Koreans soldiers were killed in one of its missile strikes.
Reports from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service suggest the North will send, once the current deployment is complete, four brigades of light infantry of the 11th Corps, more than 12,000 soldiers.
“They are the best trained, best fed, and best equipped troops in the Korean People’s Army,” North Korea military analyst Bruce Bechtol told me. “Kim Jong Un is sending his finest. These guys are not cannon fodder.”
Four brigades will not be a “game changer,” but as Bechtol, author of North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability, points out, we do not know how many more Pyongyang will send.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has already had one substantial effect on the war. “Now, October 2024, fully half the shells the Russian army has expended over the past year in the war with Ukraine have come from North Korea,” Bechtol notes. “How is that not a game changer?”
The presence of even a few North Koreans at the front in Ukraine will change the world in profound ways. For one thing, it will confirm that hardline states have banded together and are now fighting alongside each other. China has supported the Russian war effort from the beginning of the conflict with everything including troops.
“The Chinese have had ‘technical advisers’ on the ground with elements of the Wagner Group since about a year ago,” Weichert told me. “These advisers were charged with maintaining the Chinese-provided drones that Wagner mercenaries were deploying. There are numerous reports of the advisers deploying into combat with those mercenaries.”
Now is China also responsible for supplying troops through North Korea?
Many analysts think Beijing is upset. For instance, Cho Han-bum of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that Pyongyang’s dispatch of soldiers to Russia is an “action that crosses China’s red line” because close ties between the Kim and Putin regimes could weaken Beijing’s leverage over the North.
The Chinese leadership may not see it that way, however. The Kim regime’s critical dependence on China—China accounted for 95 percent of the North’s announced trade before a recent deal arms deal with Russia—suggests the Chinese are not that worried about Pyongyang’s move to bulk up their Russian ties.
“North Korea fully depends on China’s economic aid to survive, as is increasingly the case with Russia,” Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing and scholar with the Prague-based Sinopsis think tank, told me. “So Beijing has leverage to ensure that any independent Russia-North Korea alliance will not go very far.” In short, Beijing believes that neither Vladimir Putin nor Kim Jong Un is strong enough to move away from China.
There is, despite everything, an inclination in American policy circles to think the best of Chinese leaders, so it’s hard for Washington policymakers to believe that China actually approves of the growing links between Moscow and Pyongyang. There are, however, reasons to speculate that it does.
In fact, the North Korea-Russia arrangement benefits Beijing, which believes it is in its interest to support both neighboring regimes. The North Korean leader needs revenue, because at this moment his economy and agriculture are both failing. At the same time, Russia’s depleted forces need soldiers to fight Ukraine.
In this case, Beijing is also avoiding criticism from around the world for helping both parties. As Sari Arho Havren of the Royal United Services Institute told Newsweek in June, Beijing does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine and Xi wants to “maintain the appearance of limiting direct military support for Russia himself.”
Xi Jinping is almost certainly pleased that he is accomplishing many objectives with one sly maneuver. The North Korean regime is reducing the need for Chinese aid, Russia is getting assistance for the Ukraine war and therefore tying up states that Beijing perceives to be foes, and China is out of the spotlight as most everyone assumes it is aggrieved.
Many scholars downplay the sustainability of the relationships among the three regimes, but as James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy pointed out to me in July, “China, Russia, and North Korea are more aligned today than at any time since the Korean War.”
China and North Korea are now both present on the battlefield in Ukraine. As these hardline states align and close ranks with Russia, they are taking on the rest of the world in what looks like the most consequential war of this era.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.