North Korea: How Elite Soldiers Can Change the War in Ukraine

With thousands of North Korean troops deployed to Russia for likely action against Ukraine, questions are being raised about how well the fighters, who have no combat experience, will perform.

It is unclear how many casualties Pyongyang’s forces will suffer and how many of the country’s elite soldiers, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, will be willing to be involved in the bloody conflict.

Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence agencies have said in recent weeks that North Korea has sent between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to Russia to bolster Moscow’s war effort against Kiev.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that he had told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were at “Russian training grounds in the immediate vicinity of the war zone.”

South Korean intelligence said earlier this month that an initial group of 1,500 fighters had traveled to Russia and were equipped with Russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and fake documents claiming the fighters were residents of regions in Siberia. More troops were expected to travel soon, the agency said in mid-October.

Washington has said these will be “legitimate military targets” and US envoy to the UN Robert Wood said if North Korean troops “enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will certainly return in body bags.”

How will Russia benefit from North Korean fighters?

There are some clear advantages to North Korean forces swelling Russian ranks at this point in the war.

Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies, told Newsweek: “North Korean troops will give Russia an immediate boost simply by increasing Russian manpower on the front lines.”

More than two and a half years into a grueling war, both Kiev and Moscow are looking for ways to replenish their tired ranks, sidestepping unpopular moves such as a wave of mobilization or pushing back the conscription era by bypassing younger recruits.

The head of Kiev’s National Security Council, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, told Ukrainian parliamentarians earlier this week that Ukraine would draft another 160,000 people into the army.

Russia in particular has relied heavily on tactics called “meat grinder” attacks in Ukraine, causing very high casualty rates in infantry-led attacks to overwhelm defenses. It has made slow but steady gains in eastern war-torn Ukraine this year. Russia said on Wednesday it had captured Selydove, a city in the eastern Donetsk region near Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub for Kiev.

According to Ukrainian figures, Russia has suffered almost 700,000 casualties since February 2022. Western estimates put the number of dead and injured in Moscow at around 610,000, with September the bloodiest month yet.

A senior Estonian intelligence official said in late October that Russian losses could reach 40,000 this month. US figures show that Moscow can attract around 30,000 new recruits every month.

Although current North Korean troop numbers would represent only a small percentage of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, they could still “free up Russian forces to lead the offensives,” according to the U.S. think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Russia’s counter-offensives are focusing on this,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, professor of international relations at King’s College London.

Hailing from North Korea’s highly militarized society with its extensive military and regular training exercises, the fighters are likely to be effective in supporting Russian operations, Pacheco told Pardo. Newsweek.

Despite their unfamiliarity with Russian territory and weapons stockpiles, they are unlikely to need extensive training on the weapons, guns, mortars and other explosives Russia uses against Ukraine, Pacheco Pardo argued.

“They could be useful in expelling Ukrainian forces from the areas of the Kursk region,” Yeo added.

Kiev’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk border region almost three months ago took Russia and many international observers by surprise. Moscow has still not been able to wrest Kiev’s grip on territory it controls in Russia, known as the Ukrainian salient, although it has recaptured some of the territory Ukraine seized in recent weeks.

One school of thought is that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive — largely seen as a success by Kiev and an embarrassment to Moscow — really made the case for using North Korean troops to push Ukrainian forces back to the border.

Kyiv’s military intelligence service GUR said Thursday that it had first detected North Korean troops in Kursk the day before.

At least some of the thousands of fighters are believed to be “storm troopers,” or members of Pyongyang’s special operations forces trained for infiltration and assassination. South Korean officials say Pyongyang has about 200,000 members of its special forces, according to the CSIS think tank.

They are “certainly better trained to fight than Russian conscripts with little to no military experience,” Yeo said. “But it is unclear whether Kim Jong Un would send an entire corps of elite troops.”

“Based on what other militaries are doing, these deployed forces will be well trained and equipped because they have an immediate ‘real world’ mission and not an ‘on-call’ mission,” the CSIS assessed.

Many of those who pass through the North Korean military end up in non-military tasks such as farming and construction, without much intensive combat training. Ji Hyun Park, a North Korean defector, now a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.

“Given all this, it is likely that the North Korean forces deployed in Ukraine are not exclusively elite forces,” Park said Newsweek. “While some soldiers may be tasked with psychological warfare operations, most will likely fill the gaps left by Russian forces and act as expendable ‘cannon fodder’.”

“If these troops were sent into direct combat and suffered heavy casualties, it would effectively amount to a large-scale massacre,” Park said.

The North Korean leader may be less likely to send more elite fighters if the number of casualties approaches the rate at which Russian forces are supporting them, Yeo added.

What’s in it for Pyongyang?

For North Korea, these fighters are gaining combat experience to which they have not been exposed on a large scale for decades, since a 1953 armistice ended the Korean War.

North Korea could perhaps deploy its personnel to operate weapons in combat conditions, test them out and figure out how to adapt their equipment.

Pyongyang has supplied Moscow with a significant number of missiles and millions of grenades. Its support, Kyiv’s military intelligence chief said earlier, makes North Korea Russia’s most formidable ally that Ukraine has to contend with. In recent months, Kiev has persistently targeted ammunition depots where North Korean ammunition is stored.

Stumbling blocks

Coming from North Korea’s closed society, there may be difficulties in communicating and working smoothly with the Russian forces, Yeo said.

“Although North Korean troops undergo training at Russian military facilities in the Far East, differences in language, culture, training and war doctrine may reduce the effectiveness of North Korean forces until they are better integrated with Russian units,” Yeo said.

Images published online from Russian and Ukrainian sources appeared to show North Korean soldiers at a Russian training ground in the far eastern Primorsky region, which borders North Korean territory. The Wall Street Journal, Citing analyzes of videos circulating online and unnamed intelligence officials, they reported that the North Korean soldiers are young and appear to be of light build, suggesting some degree of hunger among the ranks from the mysterious nation.

“North Korean troops have been conditioned with unwavering loyalty to their leadership and a unique psychological resilience cultivated by the regime,” intended to instill a sense of “absolute sacrifice for the state” among Pyongyang’s personnel, Park said.

“However, this psychological preparation may not translate effectively into practical resilience in the type of active combat scenarios we are currently seeing in Ukraine, where they face modernized and highly capable opposition in unfamiliar terrain,” Park said.

North Korea may also face morale problems if its forces continue to absorb the casualties approaching Russian fighters, Yeo added.

Pyongyang could also explore issues of desertion and defections, Yeo noted.

A Ukrainian government-backed hotline intended for Russian soldiers willing to surrender as prisoners of war has published an appeal to North Korean soldiers urging them “not to die senselessly on foreign soil.” The message was published in Korean.

Ukrainian media reported in mid-October that 18 North Korean soldiers had already deserted close to the border with Ukraine, citing anonymous intelligence officials. This could not be independently verified.

“It is possible that some North Korean soldiers who surrender or are captured by Ukrainian forces will not want to return to Russia or North Korea,” Yeo argued. “The defection of North Korean special operations forces would be an embarrassing blow to the Kim regime.”