Troops to Russia -- risk and opportunity for Kim Jong-un

Mark O'Neill November 24, 2024 22:33

The North Korean soldier lay on the ground in terror as a Ukrainian drone circled above him. Will it kill him, or simply photograph him?

The image, on sites on the Internet that cover the Ukrainian war, showed the risk that Kim Jong-un is running by sending more than 10,000 men to fight for Russia.

Vladimir Putin is using them as part of a force of 50,000 in the Kursk region of Russia, of which the Ukrainian army captured a portion in August.

He has ordered his generals to recapture the lost territory before January 20 when Donald Trump will begin his second term as U.S. president.

He does not want his Ukrainian opponent, Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold any Russian land ahead of negotiations he expects to begin during a Trump term.

The North Koreans have the great misfortune to find themselves in the most dangerous place on earth. In October, the Russian army lost 42,000, killed or wounded, the highest monthly figure since the start of the war, according to the UK government. A large portion of the casualties were in the Kursk region.

Putin will use the Koreans like his own soldiers, in frontal assaults against well-prepared Ukrainian positions. They enable the Russians to gain small pieces of territory, but at enormous human cost.

For the Koreans, it is the first large-scale combat since the end of the Korean War in 1953. They have never experienced the sophisticated electronic warfare of drones nor combat in trenches and at close quarters.

“North Korea is not sending troops but rather cannon-fodder mercenaries,” Kim Yong-hyun, South Korean Defence Minister, told the national parliament last month. The North Korean media has not reported the deployment.

Reluctant to order general mobilisation, which would be most unpopular, Putin is sending to the front anyone he can find – convicts, the unemployed and foreigners, including Central Asians, Africans, Indians, Nepalis and Sri Lankans.

On the Internet, Ukrainian and Russian military commentators say that the North Koreans are handicapped by not knowing the Russian language, unfamiliarity with the intense battle conditions and inability to distinguish between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.

So why is Kim sending thousands of his compatriots to their deaths in a war that does not threaten his country and means nothing to his people?

His country is one of the most isolated on earth. It faces international sanctions because of its nuclear weapons programme.

In 2023, its trade with China was US$2.29 billion, 98,3 per cent of total foreign trade. Trade with Russia was a meagre US$34 million.

Lee Hae-jung, a research fellow at the Hyundai Research Institute, said that, as long as the current sanctions regime remained in place, prospects for North Korea’s economic growth were limited.

It runs a centrally planned, Stalinist economy, with emphasis on heavy industry and dominated by state companies. It has not followed the example of China and Vietnam in nurturing a market economy. As a result, living standards for ordinary people are low.

The alliance with Putin offers Kim grain, oil, gas and other commodities he needs, as well as, foreign analysts believe, technologies for his missile and nuclear weapons programmes.

So what are the risks? One is the risk of escape. North Korean defectors have offered Ukraine programmes in the Korean language aimed at the soldiers to persuade them to surrender.

This is more likely after the soldiers discover conditions on the front line – many Russian troops say the wounded are not evacuated and are left to die and that their commanders set them impossible missions.

“You cannot control people in a battlefield as well as you do in Siberian forests or Libyan deserts,” said Lee Min-bok, a North Korean defector in Soeul. “I expect more and more North Korean soldiers will desert their units as the war drags on.”

Second, Putin will certainly ask Kim for more soldiers. For him, it is better to send foreigners and non-Slav Russians to the front.

This will lead to the greatest loss of North Korean soldiers since the Korean War. How will Kim’s generals accept the death of their men in a war that has no connection to their country?

With the Workers Party, the military is the most powerful institution in the country, receiving up to 25 per cent of national GDP. It maintains 1.3 million active-duty soldiers and keeps 7.6 million reservists.

Its leaders are the only people who could overthrow Kim.

A Western diplomat who has served in Pyongyang said: “Kim is in a corner. He cannot make the promised weapons deliveries to Russia and so is sending troops instead, It is high risk.

“They are under-trained. They are not allowed to have sex during their ten years of service and are busy reading porn on the battlefront. They are special forces from core elite families, so death or failure will be very unpopular among a constituency on which Kim must rely,” he said.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.