United States defence secretary Lloyd Austin has waded in on reports that North Korea was preparing to enter the Ukraine war with troops.
“If they are co-belligerents, if their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf, that is a very, very serious issue,” Austin said.
Austin was returning from his fourth visit to Kyiv, where he announced a $400m package of US weapons for Ukraine.
John Kirby, White House national security spokesman, said Washington believes that at least 3,000 North Korean soldiers arrived this month by sea to Vladivostok, Russia’s largest Pacific port.
“These soldiers then travelled onward to multiple Russian military training sites in eastern Russia, where they are currently undergoing training,” Kirby said on Wednesday. “We do not yet know whether these soldiers will enter into combat alongside the Russian military, but this is certainly a highly concerning probability.”
He added that should they deploy to fight against Ukraine, “they’re fair game”.
North Korea also stands accused of exporting ballistic missiles and artillery shells that have already been found detonated on Ukrainian soil.
The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, told The War Zone, a US outlet, that 11,000 North Korean infantrymen were in training in eastern Russia and were to be deployed to Ukraine.
“They will be ready on November 1,” he said, adding that the first batch of 2,600 would be sent to fight a Ukrainian counter-invasion in Kursk.
North Korean soldiers would use Russian weapons and ammunition, he said.
That figure was close to the one given by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) on October 18. Yonhap News Agency said the NIS had learned Pyongyang had recently decided to deploy four brigades amounting to 12,000 troops to Ukraine.
That was also the figure given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his evening address on Tuesday: “We have information that two units of military personnel from North Korea are being trained – potentially even two brigades of 6,000 people each.”
A week earlier, Zelenskyy told the Verkhovna Rada – the parliament in Kyiv – that in addition to fighting, North Koreans were also replacing Russian factory workers drafted to fight.
“The coalition of criminals together with Putin’s state now includes North Korea,” he said.
The NIS said it monitored the first batch of 1,500 troops being ferried to Vladivostok on board four landing ships between October 8 and 13.
It said they were stationed in Russian military bases at the Russian port as well as Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk to its north. They were reportedly undergoing training in Russian weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Russia may be trying to disguise the involvement of North Korea with troops.
According to the NIS, the North Koreans were issued with fake ID cards from the republics of Yakutia and Buryatia “who looked similar to North Koreans. It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed to the battlefield.”
The NIS also assessed that North Korea had sent 13,000 containers worth of artillery shells, antitank rockets and missiles. Both Ukrainian and US defence intelligence agencies have confirmed debris of North Korean missiles in Ukraine.
South Korea has in the past suggested it could pivot towards actively helping Ukraine with offensive weapons if North Korea were sucked into the war on Russia’s side.
On Monday, Russia’s ambassador to Seoul sought to provide assurances that Russian-North Korean cooperation “is not directed against the security interests of the Republic of Korea”.
If confirmed, the presence of North Koreans as fighters would appear to indicate that Russia is not as well-provisioned for personnel as it claims. Russia has been fighting this war with volunteers and contract servicemen, often from former Soviet republics, and has avoided using regular Russian draftees.
Last week, Russian Security Council deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev was quoted by state news agency TASS as saying the armed forces’ staffing plan for the year was 78 percent fulfilled.
“Overall, this rate is rather good,” Medvedev said.
But the numbers Russia requires to keep up its pace of offensive operations are staggering.
Throughout the past week, for example, Ukraine has estimated more than 1,300 Russian casualties a day and claims more than 600,000 Russian casualties for the entire war.
Al Jazeera is unable to verify these claims, but Medvedev said the Russian military signed up 190,000 contract fighters in the first half of the year alone.
Russia has also been losing equipment at a fair clip.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Russia had lost at least 9,000 tanks, 18,000 armoured fighting vehicles and 19,500 artillery systems by mid-October.
Oryx, an independent open-source intelligence platform, has confirmed the loss of 3,500 individual tanks and more than 7,300 armoured vehicles of various kinds.
Lloyd Austin estimated the war has cost Russia over $200bn so far.
Ukrainian National Guard spokesman Ruslan Muzychuk said Russian forces had increased their use of armoured vehicles and tanks in recent days to take advantage of unseasonably dry weather, before the onset of winter.
Ukraine recorded a high rate of daily attacks in the eastern Donetsk region during the past week, with Russian forces focusing especially on Kurakhove and Pokrovsk.
These are towns lying west of Avdiivka, which Russian forces seized in February, and pursued their advantage as Ukrainian forces struggled to establish a new defensive line. Russian forces have formed a salient 40km (25 miles) west of Avdiivka in the intervening months.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said it had “observed three battalion-sized mechanised assaults in western Donetsk Oblast in the last week alone – a notable increase in tempo, as ISW only observed reports of Russian forces conducting four battalion-sized mechanised assaults in eastern Ukraine from late July to early October 2024”.
Ukraine has responded with a stout defence that saw no new towns falling to Russian forces during the past week. Consistent with its policy this year, it has tried to take the war to Russian territory with deep strikes.
Its Security Service and Military Intelligence said their drones struck the Sverdlov weapons factory in the city of Dzerzhinsk in Nizhny Novgorod, 900km (560 miles) from Ukraine, on Sunday.
According to Western intelligence, it is one of Russia’s largest munitions factories, producing explosives, artillery shells, glide bombs, and anti-aircraft and antitank missiles.
On the same day, Ukrainian drones struck the Lipetsk-2 airbase, triggering secondary explosions.
On Friday night, Ukraine struck the Kremniy El plant in Bryansk.
The head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, said it is one of Russia’s largest microelectronics plants, providing chips and circuitry for Iskander missiles, Pantsir air defence systems, drones, radars and electronic warfare systems.
This was the second major Ukrainian drone attack against Russian assets in 10 days. On October 9 and 10 Ukraine struck the oil depot at Feodosia in occupied Crimea, a Shahed drone storage depot in Yeysk, and the Khanskaya airfield in Adygea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was on the diplomatic offensive on Tuesday and Wednesday, hosting 36 world leaders at Kazan, in southwest Russia. His high-level scheduled meetings included South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian premier Narendra Modi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Putin called Sino-Russian relations “a model for how relations between states should be built in the modern world”.
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