This content was first published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
South Korea said on Friday that North Korea is making arrangements to send more troops to Russia as an increase in deaths, while Ukraine claimed that the North’s more aid would primarily involve weapon and artillery forces.
About 4, 000 of the up to 12, 000 North Vietnamese soldiers dispatched to Russia’s Kursk region to help it in its battle against Ukraine have been killed or wounded, according to Ukraine on Wednesday.
Without going into further detail, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, said on Friday that” the North Korean government is accelerating follow-up methods and procedures for additional army operations” in response to an increase in deaths and prisoners of war that occurred four weeks into the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The JSC stated in December that it believed the North was planning to send” death drones” to Russia along with additional troops in an effort to upgrade its normal forces, which are quantitatively inferior to those of South Korea, by utilizing the conflict as an opportunity to use the war to take ancient forces and allow new ones to get combat experience.
Separately, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief also said North Korea was expected to send reinforcements to Kursk and it would mostly be missile and artillery troops, defense and security publication , The War Zone , reported.
The War Zone , cited Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency, as saying the North would also send more of the KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles that it had already provided to Moscow, and the North Koreans would train Russians on all of those systems.
Budanov added that he was unsure of how many or when new troops would be arriving, but an unidentified U.S. defense official, according to The New York Times, reported on Wednesday that North Korean reinforcements were anticipated to arrive in Kursk “within the next two months.”
Barbs at UN
Russia and North Korea once more refrained from confirming or refuting Kursk’s troop deployment.
Russian envoy Andrey Belyousov criticized for deepening military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang at a disarmament conference held on Thursday at the U.N. Office in Geneva, saying:” On the Korean Peninsula, South Korea, the United States, and Western allies are attempting to portray themselves as protectors of peace, but this is contradictory to reality.
He added that South Korea and the United States conducted joint military exercises on the Korean peninsula during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Pyongyang last year that revealed potential aggressors: South Korea and the United States colluded.
The North’s efforts to increase its defenses were described as “legitimate exercise of the right” to self-defense that was completely in accordance with the U.N. Charter, according to North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol.
Regardless of whether other nations recognize us as a fully nuclear-armed state or not, Ju continued,” Our status as a fully nuclear-armed state is an undeniable and indisputable reality.”
In response, Kim Il-hoon, South Korea’s deputy permanent representative to the U. N. in Geneva, said the North was making a “futile effort” to distort the cause and result of the situation on the Korean peninsula.
” The South Korea-U. North Korea and Russia claim that their military cooperation is legal, but the S. alliance was formed as a result of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950 and the destruction of the Korean Peninsula. They are violating many principles of the U. N. Charter”, Kim added.
