Kim Jong Un with soldiers of the North Korean army. Photo: Reuters
According to South Korean intelligence, 3,000 North Korean soldiers had already arrived in Russia by October 23, with plans to send up to 12,000 troops to participate in the war against Ukraine. The Ukrainian side has published a video allegedly showing North Korean soldiers at the Sergeevsky training ground in the Russian Far East. Mediazona spoke with Russian North Korea experts Andrei Lankov and Fyodor Tertitsky, who explained why the decision by the Pyongyang leadership was unexpected and how the North Korean army is structured.
“Nothing like this has happened in the history of North Korea,” says Andrei Lankov, a Korea expert and lecturer at Kookmin University in Seoul.
North Korea has sent its military to participate in conflicts only a few times, and these were small contingents: North Korean pilots took part in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. North Korean military personnel also have accompanied arms shipments.
“North Korea has always been a fairly prominent weapons supplier. They specialised in cheap systems for poor buyers, so sometimes North Korean military personnel showed up in completely exotic places like Fiji or Rwanda,” Lankov adds.
Fyodor Tertitsky, a senior researcher at Kookmin University and a specialist in the North Korean army, notes that previously, when North Korea sent officers—not soldiers—abroad, each one was personally approved by either the leader or his heir, fearing “they might pick up something over there.”
Sending soldiers to Russia contradicts the isolationist course North Korea has followed in recent years, Lankov points out. “North Korea is now pursuing a policy of maximum isolation, and I reasoned that if they are moving slowly when sending workers, then dispatching military personnel would seem like an even riskier move,” he says. “The North Korean leadership doesn’t really want the country’s population to become too familiar with life outside its borders. They never wanted that, but they used to be willing to compromise—now, it seems, they aren’t. In recent years, North Korea has been more closed off than ever before in its history. The official pretext, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, but this is obviously not the real reason, merely an excuse.”
Experts agree that this decision will have consequences for the North Korean leadership. “Everyone can pick up interesting ideas abroad, including those who are supposed to keep an eye on things—the military police and the entire political staff,” says Tertitsky. “And then it will be very intriguing, because all these people with their military training are perfectly suited to carry out a combat mission: to kill the leader. Apart from his personal security detail, they are simply the best equipped to storm a building, overcome the resistance of the guards, and assassinate one severely obese individual.”
At the same time, Lankov doubts that the return of soldiers from the front lines will be followed by a military coup: “To be honest, I don’t really believe in such a scenario. In general, its probability will go from extremely low to very low. The North Korean elite has absolutely no reason to quarrel among themselves. They have no way out. North Korea is one of the few countries in the world facing what is called an existential threat—that is, a threat to its very existence. If the system collapses, it will bury practically the entire current North Korean ruling class under its ruins. I’m not talking about the Kim family; I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of people. These people, to varying degrees, understand this, and therefore try not to make any sudden moves.” Nevertheless, “the officer corps will likely become more critical of the government after seeing the outside world.”
Why the North Korean authorities still took this step, despite the risks, remains unclear. “I think the North Korean leadership, first of all, hopes to get a substantial amount of money for this, and secondly, perhaps hopes for the transfer of some important military technologies that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, because Russia doesn’t just hand out such technologies freely,” Lankov suggests.
The North Korean leadership “perceives the whole world as potentially hostile”, so they always need cutting-edge weaponry. Their current goal is to develop and deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles in order to “be able to strike anyone if necessary”.
According to South Korean intelligence, the troops sent to Russia are from the 11th Army Corps. “This is what used to be called light infantry, then it was renamed special operations forces. Essentially, special forces and assault troops. They are much more combat-capable compared to regular infantry, which is mainly engaged in helping collective farms and studying the works of the leader during breaks,” Tertitsky notes.
However, he points out that the North Korean army itself is very archaic and resembles “a mix of a classic 19th-century army and a Cold War-era force.” The North Korean military still has the institution of political officer who must approve the orders of commanders.
“A political officer is a person who is equal to the commander in some matters. For example, the commander gives the order, ‘Company, move there,’ and the soldier must ask, ‘Comrade political leader, do you confirm this order?’ If he does not confirm it, nothing happens,” the expert explains.
In some cases, the consent of a military police representative, the head of the personnel department, and the deputy commander for logistics may be required. How this will work in combat conditions is completely unclear. To wage war effectively, the North Koreans will have to change this system. “All these mechanisms are designed to prevent a coup, God forbid,” Tertitsky notes.
It is uncertain how the North Koreans, once on the front lines, will establish a chain of command with the Russian military—first and foremost, they will face a language barrier. According to Tertitsky, a small number of officers in the North Korean army may know English, while “Russian will be a distant second, with a huge gap.”
Experts don’t believe that the authorities had to persuade the military to go to Russia. “It is a soldier’s job to fight wherever the political leadership orders them to,” says Lankov. “This is simply part of military service. The situation here is straightforward. The military received an order to fight somewhere, so off they go. They won’t be particularly concerned with questions about the reasons for this war or the political factors that caused it, because their stance is completely unambiguous: such matters should be decided by the political leadership.”
Lankov says that the North Korean army has a good reputation, but it can only be truly tested in combat conditions. “The North Korean military hasn’t fought a real war in 70 years,” he reminds us. “The activities of small, utterly microscopic groups, most of which also didn’t engage in combat operations, don’t count. Therefore, there could be all sorts of surprises. They might prove to be such fierce warriors that the 300 Spartans would seem like weaklings in comparison, or, conversely, they might scatter at the first distant sound of an explosion.”
North Korean soldiers are indoctrinated with the idea that if they are in danger of being captured, they must commit suicide. According to Lankov, members of North Korean reconnaissance teams in South Korea and Japan who conducted small-scale operations “often preferred suicide to surrender”, but “for larger contingents, it could be a different story.”
North Koreans have a “rather rosy” image of Russia, says Tertitsky. Lankov concurs: the people of North Korea see Russia as an “astonishingly rich, very free country with a fascinating culture that is generally quite friendly”—much wealthier and freer than Korea. For a North Korean, freedom means “the ability to tell jokes about the president, criticise the governor in the newspaper, travel to any part of the country without the hassle of obtaining five or six permits, take your child to a cheap resort in Egypt, read books that are strictly forbidden in North Korea, and access the internet,” he lists.
Currently, the official North Korean media echoes the same narrative about the war against Ukraine as RT, Tertitsky notes. Until last summer, North Korea’s domestic media didn’t write anything at all about the invasion. The situation changed after the visit of Sergei Shoigu, then Russia’s defence minister, to North Korea.
“Now the line is that the current Ukrainian government is an American puppet, and Russia is waging a war to protect its territory from an attack by a pro-American aggressive regime in Kyiv, as well as to liberate the Ukrainian people from the aforementioned reactionary pro-American regime,” says Lankov. “This is the official stance. How much the population believes it is hard to say. I think they largely do, because most have no other sources of information.”
Editor: Dmitry Treschanin
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