North Korean soldiers on the Ukrainian front amid Pyongyang-Seoul power game
What are the repercussions in Asia of the deployment of Kim Jong-Un's troops in Ukraine? Prof Andrew Yeo told AsiaNews that geopolitical lines are being redrawn. Ukraine may be encouraging North Korean soldiers to desert, but support for Ukraine in South Korea is a divisive issue. For its part, China is trying to avoid being identified as part of the Russia-North Korea bloc.
Milan (AsiaNews) – While war in Europe has overshadowed the conflict in East Asia, the latter has been simmering for several years. Now, with North Korea deploying some 10,000 troops in Russia, tensions are rising again on the Korean peninsula, this according to Andrew Yeo, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies and professor of politics at The Catholic University of America.
Initial reports noted that “North Korean soldiers were being sent to Russia's Far East, and now they're dispatched to the front lines in Kursk” where Ukraine launched an offensive in August. “When that story broke out, there were several things happening between North and South Korea,” the expert told AsiaNews. “North Korea blew up inter-Korea railroad and roads.” Although “These weren't being used,” they “had been established in the hopes that there would be more engagement.”
The North Koreans “have been continuing to use what we sometimes call grey zone tactics launching balloons filled with trash into South Korea. Grey zone means that they're not so dangerous to provoke necessarily a counterattack from South Korea, but bad enough that they are a concern to the South Koreans.”
How much are these actions related to the presence of North Korean soldiers in Russia? “I think they're separate issues,” Prof Yeo said. Yet, “they are connected in a sense that North Korea basically has a new direction in terms of how it sees, how it engages South Korea.”
“North Korea has shifted its direction from four or five years ago when they were holding these high-level summits with South Korea and the United States.” Now, they made a “turn to other countries like Russia, perhaps Iran,” while “China provides a lot of economic support.”
According to Prof Yeo, there are several reasons for this change of course, emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. “That’s when I think Kim Jong-un took a different tack. He decided that negotiations with the US had failed.”
The reference is to the Hanoi summit, held in 2019 in Vietnam between then-President (and newly elected) Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
The summit ended without an agreement due to differences between the two sides. Pyongyang sought the lifting of some sanctions, while Washington wanted a total termination of North Korea’s nuclear programme, demands neither side could accept.
After this failure, North Korea began to look inward again. There “were changes in domestic laws. Increased punishment and fines for being caught with outside information.” Above all, “It seemed like, Kim Jong-un was trying to reassert his authority.”
“He began to see the South Korean government as more and more hostile to the point where, at the end of 2023, he said that he no longer sought unification, and South Korea” was “like a foreign enemy state.” This constitutes “a shift in North Korea's thinking and strategy.”
Meanwhile, South Korea saw a change in government, with the election in 2022 of conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol. Once in office, Yoon chose Kim Yung-Ho as Unification Minister. “He's a professor, and used to talk about regime collapse in North Korea, collapsing and being unified with South Korea.”
South Korea “has been very keen in providing more information to North Korea, i.e. information warfare as they call it.” In 2020, Pyongyang blew up the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong in response to propaganda leaflets and increased its aggressive rhetoric.
Meanwhile, “North Korea stopped talking to South Korea and the US even before the change in government [in Seoul]. The previous Moon government was progressive, and very much wanted engagement with North Korea.”
Finally, the geopolitical context of the region has also changed. For Kim’s regime, the Ukraine conflict is as real as the one along the Taiwan Strait. What is happening is that “new geopolitical lines are being redrawn.”
With the “tightening of relations in the West between the United States, NATO and Indo-Pacific countries, North Korea is more inclined towards confrontation.” In fact, “it finds that it's much better to be aligned in this new Cold War with Russia.”
The fact that North Korean soldiers are not in the rear but on the front line in Ukraine raises the question of whether we are not witnessing the dress rehearsal of a conflict that will then be replicated in the Pacific. For Andrew Yeo, the answer is no.
“The North Korean regime is very opportunistic. I think, first and foremost, they could receive cash with economic support,” like “food, fuel, you know, economic assistance.” On the “longer term, there are definitely other benefits that North Korea could receive”.
For example, “they can test their weapons” on a battlefield. And since “North Korean soldiers have not really fought in a war since 1953, the end of the Korean War, this would give some of their soldiers battle experience.”
Nevertheless, “I think that's more of a secondary rationale for the regime as opposed to what are the immediate gains and benefits. But that again is one of the concerns in the West because they know that as North Korea deepens ties with Russia, it has other implications about Russians helping North Koreans improve their rocket and missile technology.”
It is not clear whether Pyongyang will send more troops; much will depend on what happens on the ground, on how this first group performs before more are sent.
These soldiers have probably received some type of indoctrination from the regime; for this reason, the Ukrainians could engage in psychological warfare. “I wouldn't be surprised if Ukrainians use loudspeakers, speaking in Korean, telling North Koreans that they're being used as pawns in this conflict” to induce them to desert.
“A recent meeting between South Korea and NATO officials in Brussels [. . .] was extremely useful. At the same time, further South Korean support for Ukraine is likely to be divisive domestically.”
“There's definitely going to be a debate. Opposition politicians” are “protesting even Yun's language about support for Ukraine and people holding signs saying that we should stay out of the Ukraine war.” For their part, “conservatives and those who support Yung frame the issue as democracies versus autocracies.”
The next few weeks of fighting in Ukraine will be crucial to understand how the North Korean (and possibly South Korean) commitment in Russia will evolve. In the meantime, in the East, China is carefully watching developments in Ukraine as well.
The Chinese “have been, at least publicly or officially, fairly silent.” For China, the North Koreans “have this threat from the United States, so they're going to do what they can to protect themselves,” but “there are some concerns.”
“The US assumes that Beijing has much more influence than they actually do over North Korea.” In reality, “the Chinese signed on [. . .] for sanctions,” but do not want to be associated with “North Korea’s newfound relationship with Russia”.
Beijing is concerned that Russian-North Korean relations will be destabilising, giving “reason for the US, Japan, Korea to further strengthen their alliance” at its expense.
.png)
