North Korea deployment complicates war in Ukraine

31/10/2024 6:02

        North Korea's deployment
        to Russia to aid its war against Ukraine has the potential to
        lengthen the already 2-1/2-year old conflict and draw in
        additional actors, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on
        Wednesday.
        
        Some 10,000 North Korean forces were already deployed to
        eastern Russia, wearing Russian uniforms and carrying Russian
        equipment, Austin said, in what he added increasingly looked
        like a deployment to support Russia's combat operations in the
        Kursk region, near the border with Ukraine.
        
        Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion into Kursk in
        August and hold hundreds of square kilometers of territory
        there.
        
        After talks with his South Korean counterpart at the
        Pentagon, Kim Yong-hyun, Austin called the deployment a
        "dangerous and destabilizing escalation."
        
        "It does have the potential of lengthening the conflict or
        broadening the conflict," Austin told reporters, standing
        alongside Kim. "It could encourage others to take action,
        different kinds of action ... There are a number of things that
        could happen."
        
        If North Korea aids Russia's war, North Korean troops can
        expect to be targeted by Ukrainian troops using weapons provided
        by the United States and its allies, and some will likely die on
        the battlefield, Austin added.
        
        "If they are fighting alongside of Russian soldiers, they
        are co-belligerents, and we have every reason to believe that
        ... they will be killed and wounded as a result of that," Austin
        said.
        
        South Korea has warned that Pyongyang would learn valuable
        lessons from its troops engaging in combat and witnessing modern
        warfare by helping Russia, and that constituted a direct
        military threat to South Korea.
        
        Speaking alongside Austin, Kim cautioned that North Korea,
        in exchange for the deployment, was likely to seek Russian
        technology on tactical nuclear weapons, ballistic missile
        submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
        
        "I believe this can result in the escalation of the security
        threats on the peninsula," Kim said, speaking through a
        translator.