North Korean troops could help Putin avoid a risky Russian mobilization
North Korea has sent troops to Russia, United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed on October 23. Austin is the latest senior Western official to raise the alarm over the deployment of North Korean soldiers to Russia amid fears that the Hermit Kingdom is poised to participate directly in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the first to warn that Russia was about to be reinforced by large numbers of North Korean troops. South Korea has since confirmed Zelenskyy’s claims. In recent days, Britain’s ambassador to the UN said it was “highly likely” Pyongyang has agreed to send combat troops in support of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
If North Korean troops do appear on the Ukrainian battlefield in the coming weeks, it would be the latest in a series of milestones marking Pyongyang’s expanding support for Putin’s Ukraine invasion. North Korea has reportedly been supplying Russia with artillery shells since the first year of the war, and began delivering ballistic missiles to Moscow in late 2023. In October 2024, intelligence sources claimed that North Korea was now providing half of all shells being used by Russia in Ukraine.
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The presence of North Korean soldiers in Ukraine would risk transforming the largest European invasion since World War II into a truly global conflict. It would also serve to highlight the mounting manpower challenges Vladimir Putin faces as he looks to maintain a war of attrition amid staggering Russian losses.
When Putin first took the decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, he seems to have genuinely believed his troops would not encounter any serious resistance and would instead be welcomed as liberators. This proved to be a massive miscalculation.
Since the start of the invasion, the Russian army has sustained extremely heavy casualties in Ukraine, and has been forced to retreat from around half of the territories seized during the initial stage of the war. According to US officials, more than six hundred thousand Russian troops had been killed or wounded by October 2024, with September ranking as the deadliest month of the entire campaign.
Russia’s losses are in large part due to the Kremlin’s reliance on so-called “human wave” tactics. This extremely costly but effective approach involves successive waves of Russian troops gradually edging forward across the battlefield while relying on superior numbers to overwhelm Ukrainian defensive positions. This has allowed Russia to achieve small but visible front line advances in eastern Ukraine throughout 2024. At the same time, it has led to daily losses that regularly exceed one thousand dead or wounded soldiers.
In recent months, there have been growing signs that Russia is struggling to maintain the supply of fresh soldiers to the front lines. The most striking indication of Putin’s troop shortages came in early August, when Ukraine launched an offensive into Russia’s Kursk region and encountered threadbare border defenses manned by conscript troops. Almost three months on, the Ukrainian army continues to occupy hundreds of square kilometers of Russian territory.
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The Kremlin is exploring a range of different avenues as it seeks to replenish the depleted ranks of the Russian army. Initial steps included expanding the draft age and recruiting directly from Russia’s prison population. More recently, the Russian authorities have sought to attract new recruits with promises of generous monthly salaries and bumper one-time enlistment payments. These dramatically increased bounties point to growing difficulties in attracting enough volunteer fighters to replace combat losses suffered in Ukraine.
This does not mean that Russia is about to run out of potential soldiers, of course. In reality, Putin still has vast untapped reserves of manpower among the Russian population that he can potentially turn to if required. For now, though, he appears deeply reluctant to launch a second mobilization of the war for fear of destabilizing the home front inside Russia.
Putin announced Russia’s first partial mobilization since World War II in September 2022 at a time when his armies were retreating in Ukraine. The 2022 mobilization was an effective short-term solution, boosting the Russian military with an additional three hundred thousand troops. Crucially, however, it also proved deeply unpopular with the Russian public, sparking domestic protests and fueling a wave of migration as hundreds of thousands of military age men fled the country. With a record number of Russians already reportedly seeking asylum in the West in order to avoid military service, the Kremlin is understandably unwilling to gamble on a new mobilization unless absolutely necessary.
This may help to explain why we are now seeing reports of North Korean troops preparing to join the Russian attack on Ukraine. By turning to his North Korean partners for fresh soldiers, Putin hopes to plug the gaps in his decimated military without running the risk of mobilizing his own population.
In the coming weeks, Putin will be watching carefully to see how Western leaders react to the arrival of North Korean troops in Ukraine. If the West fails to impose appropriate costs for this first instance of direct foreign intervention in Russia’s invasion, a disastrous precedent will be set and far larger numbers of North Korean soldiers may soon be on their way to fight in Europe.
Olivia Yanchik is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
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The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.
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Image: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un attend an official welcoming ceremony at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea June 19, 2024. (Sputnik/Vladimir Smirnov/Pool via REUTERS)
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