Seoul said Tuesday that the speeding deployment presented a “significant security threat.” Washington said North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to train in Russia and will probably fight Ukraine in weeks.
Pyongyang is accused of deploying troops in large numbers after Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin inked a mutual defence agreement in June. Seoul has long accused the nuclear-armed North of sending weapons to aid Moscow in its conflict with Kyiv.
Although North Korea has denied sending troops, its vice foreign minister stated last week in the first statement published in official media that if such a deployment occurred, it would be compliant with international law.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned North Korea could “soon” have as many as 12,000 soldiers on Russian soil, while US President Joe Biden slammed the deployment as “very dangerous.”
According to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh, 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,” she told reporters.
NATO leader Mark Rutte described the deployment as “a dangerous expansion of Russia’s war” and described it as “a sign of Putin’s growing desperation.”
Over 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the fight began in 2022, according to Rutte, who also said the Kremlin couldn’t continue the assault without outside assistance.
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.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said Tuesday that growing military cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang was “a significant security threat to the international community,” and warned Seoul was considering “countermeasures.”
Seoul’s spy agency said that the deployment of North Korean troops was “happening more rapidly than previously anticipated” Yonhap reported, with indications of “urgency and haste” in the move.
“It seems that both Russia and North Korea have accelerated their pace since the intelligence became public,” said Hong Jang-won, deputy director of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), Yonhap reported.
