North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to train in Russia and likely fight Ukraine in weeks, Washington said, as Seoul yesterday warned that the accelerating deployment posed a “significant security threat.”
Seoul has long accused the nuclear-armed North of sending weapons to help Moscow fight Kyiv, and after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a mutual defense deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, Pyongyang is alleged to have moved to deploy soldiers en masse.
North Korea has denied sending troops, but in the first comment in state media last week, its vice foreign minister said that were such a deployment to happen, it would be in line with international law.
Photo: AP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said North Korea could “soon” have as many as 12,000 soldiers on Russian soil, while US President Joe Biden called the deployment “very dangerous.”
North Korea “has sent around 10,000 soldiers in total to train in eastern Russia that will probably augment Russian forces near Ukraine over the next several weeks,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told journalists.
The deployment is “a dangerous expansion of Russia’s war,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said, adding that it was “a sign of Putin’s growing desperation.”
Rutte said more than 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the conflict started in 2022, adding the Kremlin was unable to sustain the invasion without foreign support.
Speaking in Brussels after a briefing with South Korean intelligence officials, Rutte said he could confirm that North Korean military units had been deployed in the field in Russia’s western Kursk region.
North Korea’s foreign minister traveled to Moscow this week, Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said yesterday, without giving details.
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