North Korea benefiting from troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine, US says

Pyongyang’s military ties with Russia ‘rendering it more capable of waging war against its neighbours’

North Korea is “significantly benefiting” from its troops gaining battlefield experience fighting alongside Russian forces as it makes them more capable of waging war against rivals South Korea and Japan, a US official warned the UN.

Nearly 12,000 North Korean soldiers have been training in Russia and fighting to repel the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region, deputy US ambassador Dorothy Camille Shea told the UN Security Council, which was meeting to discuss Pyongyang’s launch of a new intermediate range hypersonic ballistic missile on Monday.

North Korea “is significantly benefiting from receiving Russian military equipment, technology and experience, rendering it more capable of waging war against its neighbours”, Ms Shea said.

"In turn, the DPRK will likely be eager to leverage these improvements to promote weapons sales and military training contracts globally," she said, using the acronym for North Korea’s formal name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Washington last week claimed that more than 1,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Kursk region.

The US and the UK have criticised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for sending soldiers to a foreign country to fight its war.

The North’s alleged deployment of troops last year to aid the Russian war effort reinforced their diplomatic and military alliance. The two countries signed a comprehensive strategic defence treaty during Mr Putin’s state visit to Pyongyang last year that calls for each side to come to the other’s aid in case of an armed conflict.

South Korea’s UN ambassador, Joonkook Hwang, told the council that North Korean soldiers are “essentially slaves to Kim Jong Un, brainwashed to sacrifice their lives on faraway battlefields to raise money for his regime and secure advanced military technology from Russia”.

The North Korean ambassador justified the recent missile test and condemned the US for its involvement in Israel’s war on Gaza, accusing it of mass killings in the besieged Palestinian territory.

“When the civilian death toll exceeded 45,000 in Gaza, the United States embellished Israel’s nefarious mass killing atrocity as the right to self-defence,” Kim Song told the council.

“Meanwhile, it takes issue with the legitimate exercise of the right to self-defence of the DPRK.”

The US, the biggest arms supplier and diplomatic supporter of Israel, has been under fire as Israeli forces have relentlessly bombed and shelled Gaza for nearly 15 months, killing over 45,000 people and causing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Israel says it is targeting Hamas, which carried out an attack in southern Israel in October 2023 that left nearly 1,200 people dead.

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, sided with North Korea, repeating their longstanding accusation that the US, South Korea and Japan were provoking North Korea with military exercises.

He also rejected as "wholly unsubstantiated" the US allegation that Russia intended to share satellite and space technology with Pyongyang.

"Such statements are the latest example of baseless conjecture which is geared towards smearing bilateral cooperation between the Russian Federation and the friendly nation of the DPRK," said Mr Nebenzia.

Additional reporting by agencies.