North Korea’s troops heading to Ukraine’s frontline as cannon fodder: ‘They will surely be killed’

The G7, involving some of the world’s richest nations, have made clear that they believe the reports of thousands of North Korean troops being used to bolster Russian forces in Ukraine show Vladimir Putin’s “desperation” to compensate for losses on the frontline.

Putin’s forces are believed to be losing hundreds of troops a day, with Ukrainian estimates going as high as 1,200 to 1,500, so the more than 10,000 troops South Korea believes are in Russia would last two weeks or so at that rate.

“In the big picture, even 12,000 soldiers don’t affect the general situation of the war significantly,” says Emil Kastehelmi, who runs the Black Bird Group, which tracks the war in Ukraine.

The troops are already under fire, being shelled in the Russian border region of Kursk, according to Kyiv. That is the area where Ukrainian troops have held territory, having started a daring raid in August.

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official within the national security council said on Telegram.

Questions have been raised about the calibre of the North Korean troops, not least because none of the group, which includes 500 officers and three generals, have any combat experience. North Korea’s isolation on the international stage means that its troops, which number more than a million, have faced nothing but training.

“None would think they are going to Russia to die,” Choi Jung Hoon, a former first lieutenant in North Korea’s army, told the Associated Press. “But I think they’re cannon fodder because they will be sent to the most dangerous sites and will surely be killed.”

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the GUR, said over the weekend that the North Korean troops had been armed with extensive hardware, including mortar shells, anti-tank guided missiles and rocket launchers, as well as sniper rifles and machine guns. But it will be unfamiliar terrain, with much of North Korean training taking place in the mountains, rather than on the flat battlefields of Ukraine.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken, meanwhile, said Russia had been training the North Korean troops to use artillery and drones, as well as “basic infantry operations, including trench clearing”. He added that this indicated that Moscow intends to use these forces in frontline operations.

However, inexperience and a language barrier will likely prove prohibitive. Mr Kastehelmi says it will be paramount for proper liaison officers and translators to be employed with the troops, or risk communication proving fatal on the battlefield.

“The eventual organisational structure is a significant factor on the effectiveness, and it also defines how the troops would be integrated into Russian operations,” Mr Kastehelmi said.

Beyond that, the age and health of the troops could prove problematic.

While the specifics of who has been deployed are unknown, experts believe the troops to be mostly in their late teens and early twenties. “My heart ached,” said Mr Choi, now leader of an activist group in Seoul, when he saw a Ukraine-released video purportedly showing undersized young North Korean soldiers.

What’s more, South Korean researchers have previously found that among North Korean defectors, some of whom have been from the military, there have been significant instances of chronic hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis and parasites.

When a North Korean soldier escaped in 2017, South Korean doctors who saved him found a 27cm intestinal worm and a host of parasites in his system. His stomach contents also reflected a poor diet.

The group sent to Russia also includes members of its Storm Corps, an elite unit who are better trained and fed than most of their comrades, but former defectors from that unit remain sceptical that the age won’t prove problematic.

Ultimately, says John Foreman, former British defence attache to Moscow between 2019 and 2022 who specialised in analysing the Korean peninsula, the deployment is unlikely to have a major impact.

If anything, he said, it is nothing more than a “payday loan”, the kind that might plug the short-term problem of troop shortages at the expense of cohesion on the frontline.