North Korea’s special forces in Russia ready to join Putin’s war in Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency says

Reports suggest that North Korea could dispatch a total of 12,000 troops, formed into four brigades, to Russia

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un poses with troops during an inspection at a training base earlier this month (KCNA via KNS/AFP via Getty)

South Korea’s spy agency has warned that North Korea has sent a battalion of troops to bolster Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement that Russian navy ships had transferred 1,500 North Korean special operation forces to the Russian port city of Vladivostok earlier this month.

It said they are currently staying at military bases in Vladivostok and other locations in Russia including Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk, and that they will probably be deployed to battlegrounds after completing their adaptation training.

The NIS posted on its website satellite and other photos showing what it called Russian navy ship movements near a North Korean port, along with suspected North Korean mass gatherings in Ussuriysk and Khabarovsk, in the past week. It said more North Korean troops are expected to be sent to Russia soon.

The NIS also said it had been working with the Ukrainian intelligence service, and that it had used facial recognition artificial intelligence technology to identify North Korean officers in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region supporting Russian forces firing North Korean missiles.

North Korea has shipped more than 13,000 containers filled with artillery rounds, ballistic missiles and anti-tank rockets to Russia since August last year, the agency said, based on the remnants of weapons recovered from the front line in Ukraine. In all, more than 8 million artillery and rocket rounds have been shipped to Russia, it said.

“The direct military cooperation between Russia and North Korea that has been reported by foreign media has now been officially confirmed,” the spy agency said in a statement.

Earlier on Friday, South Korean media, citing the NIS, reported that North Korea had decided to dispatch a total of 12,000 troops formed into four brigades to Russia. North Korea has 1.2 million troops, one of the largest militaries in the world, but they lack actual combat experience.

The deployment of troops to Russia, if confirmed, would be Pyongyang’s first major involvement in a war since the 1950 to 1953 Korean war. North Korea reportedly sent a much smaller contingent to the Vietnam war and another to the civil war in Syria. Military experts have expressed doubt over just how much the troops will help, given their lack of battlefield knowledge and Pyongyang’s outdated, mostly Soviet-era, equipment.

South Korea’s presidential office said in a statement that the president, Yoon Suk Yeol, had presided over an emergency meeting earlier on Friday to discuss North Korea’s troop dispatch to Russia. The statement said participants at the meeting had agreed that North Korea’s troop dispatch poses a grave security threat to South Korea and the international community.

The announcement follows rumblings of the development from Ukrainian military intelligence sources and a declaration by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday that 10,000 troops from North Korea were heading to Ukraine.

Despite Russian denials, Mr Zelensky said the development could be “the first step to a world war”. Presenting his “victory plan” to Ukraine’s parliament earlier this week, Mr Zelensky said the two countries, Russia and North Korea, now amounted to a “coalition of criminals”.

Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have previously pledged to form closer ties (AFP via Getty)

Ukrainian media reported earlier this month that six North Koreans were among those killed by a Ukrainian missile strike in the partially occupied eastern Donetsk region on 3 October.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels before a meeting with Nato defence ministers, the Ukrainian leader said: “From our intelligence, we’ve got information that North Korea sent tactical personnel and officers to Ukraine. They are preparing on their land 10,000 soldiers, but they didn’t move them already to Ukraine or to Russia.”

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte said on Friday that members of the Western alliance “have no evidence that North Korean soldiers are involved in the fight. But we do know that North Korea is supporting Russia in many ways – weapons supplies, technological supplies, innovation, to support them in the war effort. And that is highly worrying.” Western nations including the US and the UK are closely monitoring developments.

President Yoon’s office said South Korea, together with its allies, had been closely tracking North Korea’s troop dispatch to Russia from the initial stages. South Korea will respond to the North’s activities with all available means, it added, without elaborating on what actions it might take.

According to the NIS, North Korean soldiers sent to Russia have been provided with Russian military uniforms, weapons, and false identification. After training, they are expected to be deployed from the military bases where they are currently stationed to combat zones.

“They are known as the Buryat Battalion,” a senior Ukrainian military official told Politico. Buryatia is a region in the Russian far east, near the Mongolian border.

In June, Mr Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that commits both countries to providing military assistance to each other if either is attacked, which followed a leaders’ summit in the Russian far east last year.

US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said earlier this week that the deployment of troops would mark a “significant increase” in the closeness of their relationship, but that it also indicates a “new level of desperation by Russia” amid heavy losses on the battlefield during the invasion, which is into its third year.

Sir Keir Starmer reiterated this in a press conference in Berlin on Friday, saying: “If it’s true, then to my mind it shows a level of desperation in relation to Russia.”

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report