North Korean special forces in Russia readying for combat in Ukraine war, South Korea says

October 19

North Korea has dispatched 1,500 special forces troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency said in a statement Friday, a move that will likely put further strain on already tense relations between the reclusive nuclear-armed state and the West.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement that it caught its northern neighbor “transporting North Korean special forces to Russia through a Russian naval transport ship.”

These “soldiers were given Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons,” the statement said, adding that they were also given forged identification documents to make it look like they had come from the regions in Siberia where people resemble North Koreans.

The soldiers had been dispersed across Vladivostok, a major port city in eastern Russia, which is near the borders of China and North Korea, the statement said. “These soldiers are expected to be deployed to the front line upon completing their adaptation training,” it added.

“Suspicions of ‘direct military cooperation between Russia and North Korea’ raised by foreign media have been officially confirmed,” an NIS official was quoted as saying in the statement. “We will continue to track and confirm the movement of military cooperation between Russia and North Korea through close intelligence cooperation with allies.”

The NIS posted satellite and other photos on its website showing what it called Russian navy ship movements near a North Korean port and what appeared to be mass gatherings in the Russian cities of Ussuriysk and Khabarovsk in the past week.

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Satellite images released by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service on Friday show what they say are North Korean personnel gathered within a training ground at Russia’s Ussuriysk military facility on Wednesday.

With around 1.2 million military personnel, North Korea has the world’s fourth largest military, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. Deploying troops to Russia, if confirmed, would be its first major involvement in a war since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Shortly after the assessment was released, the office of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in a statement that he had convened an emergency security meeting to “comprehensively review the impact of North Korea’s military deployment to Russia and participation in the war in Ukraine.”

According to a statement, participants of the meeting recognized that the closeness of Russia’s and North Korea’s militaries “poses a grave security threat to South Korea and the international community,” adding that they “decided not to ignore the situation and to respond to it jointly with the international community using all available means.”

Relations between Moscow and Pyongyang have grown closer in recent years, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, signed a comprehensive strategic partnership in June that included a pledge of mutual defense if either country is attacked.

The agreement was sealed at a summit in Pyongyang during a rare visit by Putin to the secretive communist state, which, like Russia, has been isolated by global sanctions. Kim also promised his “full support” for what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

At the time, U.S. officials told NBC News that transfers of military technology to Pyongyang in exchange for supplies of munitions for the war in Ukraine could vastly enhance North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs and threaten the Asia-Pacific region.

Russia has denied using North Korean troops in the war. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the claims as “another piece of fake news” during a press conference last week.

But 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 Oct. 3.

And on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government has intelligence that 10,000 troops from North Korea are being prepared to join Russian forces fighting against his country. He also warned that a third nation joining hostilities could turn the conflict into a “world war.”

The State Department said Tuesday that it was concerned by the reports of North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia. “If that’s true, it would mark a significant increase in the relationship between those two countries, the relationship that you have seen develop over the past several months,” spokesperson Matthew Miller said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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