Seoul is now considering directly supplying arms to Kyiv, including offensive weapons, after reports emerged from the country’s spy agency of neighboring North Korea’s imminent involvement in the conflict. The totalitarian Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) appears to be sending thousands of military personnel to assist and even fight alongside Russian soldiers.
South Korea’s primary intelligence agency, the NIS, claims that North Korea has already shipped the first 1,500 special forces personnel to Russia for joint training at local military bases for future combat at the Ukrainian front.
South Korean media reports also indicate that the NIS expects Pyongyang to dispatch a further 12,000 troops, in four brigades, to Russia.
Although this personnel contribution is modest compared to the roughly 600,000 Russian soldiers believed to be in Ukraine, it still counts as a major development—not least given that North Korean troops have never fought abroad in such numbers before.
Moreover, troop deployment is just the tip of the iceberg of North Korean military aid to Russia’s war efforts. The NIS monitored over 70 large-scale weapons shipments to Russia in the past year, including around 8 million artillery rounds, the one type of ammunition that both sides are in the most need of. In contrast, the EU promised to supply one million rounds to Ukraine by April 2024 and managed to send only about 650,000.
This recent escalation led South Korea’s national security council to convene for an emergency meeting on Tuesday, to discuss Seoul’s response to the North’s deepening military cooperation with Russia and its potential consequences to the delicate balance of power on the peninsula.
As a short-term measure, Seoul might start providing Kyiv with not only defensive but also lethal and offensive weaponry to help fight the emerging Moscow-Pyongyang axis on the battlefield.
Following the security council meeting, a senior official representing South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol said
We would consider supplying weapons for defensive purposes as part of the step-by-step scenarios, and if it seems they are going too far, we might also consider offensive use.
South Korea has provided financial and humanitarian military aid to Ukraine before, but so far refrained from sending lethal weaponry—citing its long-standing doctrine of not supplying arms to countries in conflict, in order to avoid being viewed as an active participant.
According to the Kiel Institute’s ‘Ukraine Support Tracker,’ South Korea has so far provided a total of €789 million worth of assistance to Ukraine—€470 million in financial aid, €304 million in humanitarian assistance, and some €15 million in defensive military aid—which ranks it globally somewhere between Austria and Slovakia.
However, for the past 70 years, South Korea has been preparing for the North’s possible invasion, meaning it has built up one of the world’s largest stockpiles of artillery shells. From this vantage point, Seoul could still contribute a lot more in direct military assistance if it wished to.
A hard policy shift would certainly be welcomed by Kyiv, as Ukrainian troops face catastrophic ammunition shortages on the front. In response to North Korea’s future participation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for a “strong response” from all international partners earlier, saying that the conflict should not be allowed to go global by “another state joining the war against Ukraine.”
The imminent presence of North Korean troops on the Ukrainian battlefield also revived the discussion about deploying Western troops on the ground, first pitched by French President Emmanuel Macron and increasingly supported by the Baltic countries.
“If information about Russia’s killing squads being equipped with North Korean ammunition and military personnel is confirmed, we have to get back to ‘boots on the ground’ and other ideas proposed by Macron,” Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Sunday. “Regretfully, we are lagging again, being reactive, but I believe in our joint capacity to make all the necessary proactive steps to turn President Macron’s ideas into action.”
