North Korean troops in Kursk could backfire on Moscow, Pyongyang

There is no longer much doubt that there are North Korean troops training in far eastern Russia.

Western intelligence services predict that some of these troops will soon be fighting in Kursk.

If they end up doing so, it could backfire badly on the Russians. It can also destabilize the Kim regime in Pyongyang.

It is important to keep in mind that Kursk is Russian territory. It was the Ukrainians who invaded Kursk. From what we understand, the Ukrainians are losing a lot of men and equipment and are systematically, if slowly, being pushed out of Kursk-area villages.

Three thousand or even ten thousand North Koreans are not likely to make any battlefield difference. A Russian combat brigade is about 8,000 foot soldiers, so a North Korean contribution would be about one brigade on the battlefield.  

The North Koreans observed so far are foot soldiers. They do not appear to have armor (tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers) or artillery. They also have only minimal training on Russian tactics, and most of them do not speak the Russian language.

If the North Koreans actually do fight on Russian territory they are not mercenaries, as some news reports suggest.  The collective west has supplied some 13,000 mercenaries to Ukraine, and an unknown number of uniformed troops who work as advisors and as specialists operating air defenses and critical communications and command and control nodes.

Russia’s Duma has just ratified a defense agreement with North Korea that provides for mutual self-help in case either country is attacked. Ukraine’s incursion in Kursk amounts to a land invasion of Russian territory, and thus it would trigger the mutual defense agreement between the DPRK and Russia.

No one knows much about North Korea’s military. It has not fought in a land battle of any consequence for decades, since the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War fighting in 1953.  By any measure, the Korean People’s Army is inexperienced and mostly lacks modern equipment.  

North Korea has mainly obsolete tanks, but these are not apparently in Russia. It does have plenty of artillery, but its artillery systems also have not been seen in Russia. Not much is known about the DPRK army’s communications and command and control, but it is likely quite old fashioned. How it could be linked to much more modern Russian systems is an open question.

The Ukrainians are playing up the possibility of North Korean troops in Kursk for one simple reason: Zelensky and Budanov, his military security chief, want the West to send troops to Ukraine to save them from defeat. They see the arrival of North Korean troops as a strong argument for NATO, or components of NATO, to send land forces to Ukraine.

There is no consensus in NATO to bring Ukraine into the alliance or to send troops openly to Ukraine. It is true that the French are in favor of both, but the Germans and Poles are not, and neither are many others. But, as happened in the case of the Iraq war, the current US administration along with the British and French may try and put together a Coalition of the Willing. To do this they would need to convince some reluctant partners to support such an enterprise. Some will not, most prominently the Germans and the Poles. 

A Coalition of the Willing would need bases in Poland to run in troops and supplies. The Poles do not want to get hit by Russian missiles and glide bombs so, despite the bravado shown by Warsaw, the chance for Poland’s active support is near zero.

There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is taunting the United States with the threat of North Korean soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Surely Putin must also know that running operations by North Korean troops would be a logistical and operational burden.

It might give the Ukrainians an opportunity to kill many North Korean soldiers – damaging, instead of supporting, the new North Korea-Russia alliance. Likewise a bad result and many casualties would unsettle and destabilize the Kim regime, a family-led brutal dictatorship that has no practical way to know just how secure it really is from its own people.

Meanwhile the Ukrainians have little to fear from the use of North Korean troops.  Managing them would be a mess for the Russians, and could hobble instead of helping Russian attempts to reclaim the Kursk territories.

Surely Ukraine’s leaders know this, but they remain hopeful that help will come from some NATO countries to bail them out in a war they are losing, and they can imagine North Korean soldiers becoming their ticket out of disaster.

Stephen Bryen served as staff director of a subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.

This article was originally published on his Substack, Weapons and Strategy. It is republished with permission.