North Korea is preparing to send more soldiers to fight in the Ukraine war, military officials in South Korea have said, despite reports of heavy casualties among troops from the communist state who have already been sent to the battlefield.
The claim that Pyongyang could be planning to increase its support for the Kremlin came as Donald Trump suggested he would attempt to rekindle his relationship with Kim Jong-un, describing the North Korean leader as a “smart guy” in an interview with Fox News.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement on Friday that four months after the North sent an estimated 11,000 troops to the Ukraine conflict – a significant number of whom have been killed or wounded – the regime “is suspected of accelerating follow-up measures and preparation for an additional dispatch of troops”.
The JCS did not give details of what follow-up measures Pyongyang might be considering.
North Korea began sending troops to the Ukraine war last autumn, months after Kim and Vladimir Putin agreed a mutual defence pact designed to strengthen their alliance against what the leaders called a US-led “western hegemony”.
In return for providing boots on the ground, as well as weapons and ammunition, North Korea is thought to be hoping to gain access to sophisticated Russian missile and satellite technology.
In an interview on Thursday, Trump said he planned to resurrect attempts to engage Kim, whom he met three times during his first term in the White House.
When asked if he would “reach out” to Kim again, Trump replied: “I will, yeah. He liked me.” Trump added that Barack Obama had referred to North Korea as the “biggest threat” when they met during the presidential transition in late 2016.
“[Obama] said North Korea is the biggest threat and I solved that problem,” Trump said, according to an account of the interview by the Yonhap news agency. “And I got along with him. He’s not a religious zealot. He happens to be a smart guy. Kim Jong-un is a smart guy.”
During their first summit, in Singapore in June 2018 – the first between a US and North Korean leader – Trump and Kim signed an agreement committing to the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”, with Trump hailing the meeting a success.
But their second summit, in Hanoi in February 2019, ended in failure when the two disagreed on what the US should offer North Korea in terms of sanctions relief in return for dismantling its nuclear arsenal.
They met again at the demilitarised zone – the heavily armed border separating North and South Korea – in June 2019, and agreed to set up working-level talks. But nuclear negotiations between the US and North Korea have not been held since late 2019, and Pyongyang has gone on to conduct numerous ballistic missile tests. It has not, however, tested a nuclear weapon since 2017.
North Korea’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict is widely considered to have been a disaster. Its troops lack combat experience and are fighting in unfamiliar territory. And earlier this month, Ukrainian forces captured two North Korean soldiers, one of whom said he had not been told he was being sent to fight in the war, believing instead he was going on a training exercise.
Ukrainian government officials claim that North Korea has deployed about 11,000 soldiers to Russia’s Kursk region. Intelligence officials in South Korea say 270 of them have been killed and around 2,700 injured.
North Korea has not publicly acknowledged its role in the war, but in October Putin did not deny that North Korean soldiers were in Russia, while the North’s vice-foreign minister, Kim Jong-gyu, said any such deployment would be in line with international law.
