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By Security & Defense Reporter
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With thousands of North Korean troops deployed to Russia for likely action against Ukraine, there are looming questions over how well the fighters, who lack combat experience, will perform.

It is unclear how many casualties Pyongyang’s forces will sustain and just how many of the country’s elite soldiers North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be willing to involve in the bloody conflict.

Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence have said in recent weeks that North Korea was sending between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to Russia to bolster Moscow’s war effort against Kyiv.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that he had told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were on “Russian training grounds in the immediate vicinity of the war zone.”

South Korea’s intelligence agency said earlier this month that an initial batch of 1,500 fighters had traveled to Russia, and were kitted out with Russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and fake documents claiming the fighters were residents of regions in Siberia. More troops were expected to travel soon, the agency said in mid-October.

Washington has said they will be “legitimate military targets” and U.S. envoy to the U.N., Robert Wood, said that if North Korean troops “enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will surely return in body bags.”

How Will Russia Benefit from North Korean Fighters?

There are a few clear advantages to North Korean troops swelling Russia’s ranks at this point in the war.

Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies, told Newsweek: “North Korean troops will give Russia an immediate boost by sheer virtue of increasing Russian manpower on the front line.”

More than two and a half years into a grueling war, both Kyiv and Moscow are searching around for ways to replenish their tired ranks while sidestepping unpopular moves like a wave of mobilization or pulling down the draft age to include younger recruits.

The head of Kyiv’s National Security Council, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, told Ukrainian lawmakers earlier this week that Ukraine would draft another 160,000 people into the military.

Russia in particular has leaned heavily on tactics dubbed “meat grinder” assaults in Ukraine, racking up very high casualty counts with infantry-led attacks to overwhelm defenses. It has produced slow but steady gains in the east of war-torn Ukraine throughout this year. Russia said on Wednesday it had captured Selydove, a town in the eastern Donetsk region on the approach to Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub for Kyiv.

By Ukraine’s numbers, Russia has sustained close to 700,000 casualties since February 2022. Western estimates place Moscow’s count of those killed and injured at around 610,000, with September the bloodiest month so far.

A senior Estonian intelligence official said in late October that Russian losses could touch 40,000 for the month. Figures from the U.S. suggest Moscow is able to pull in around 30,000 new recruits each month.

Although current numbers of North Korean troops would make up a tiny percentage of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, according to the U.S. think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, they could still “free up Russian troops to lead on the offensives and counteroffensives that Russia is focusing on,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations at King’s College London.

Coming from North Korea’s highly militarized society with its extensive army and regular training exercises, the fighters will likely be effective in supporting Russian operations, Pacheco Pardo told Newsweek.

Despite their unfamiliarity with Russia’s territory and weapons stockpiles, they probably will not need extensive training on the guns, rifles, mortars and other explosives Russia uses against Ukraine, Pacheco Pardo argued.

“They may be useful in pushing Ukrainian troops out of the areas of the Kursk region,” added Yeo.

Kyiv’s surprise incursion into Russia’s border Kursk region almost three months ago took Russia and many international observers by surprise. Moscow still hasn’t managed to strip back Kyiv’s grip on the area it controls in Russia, known as the Ukrainian salient, although it has retaken some of the territory Ukraine grasped in the summer in the past few weeks.

One school of thought is that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive—largely perceived as a success by Kyiv and embarrassing for Moscow—really made the case for North Korean troops to be deployed to push Ukrainian troops back to the border.

Kyiv’s GUR military intelligence service said on Thursday that it had detected North Korean troops in Kursk for the first time the previous day.

At least some of the thousands of fighters are thought to be “Storm Troops,” or members of Pyongyang’s special operations forces trained for infiltration and assassination. South Korean officials say Pyongyang has around 200,000 members of its special forces, according to the CSIS think tank.

They are “certainly better trained to fight than Russian conscripts with little to no military experience,” Yeo said. “But it’s unclear whether Kim Jong Un would send an entire corps of elite troops.”

“Based on what other militaries do, these deployed troops will be well trained and equipped because they have an immediate “real world” mission and not an “on call” mission,” the CSIS evaluated.

Many of those who pass through North Korea’s military end up in non-military tasks like farming and construction, without much intensive combat training at all, Ji Hyun Park, a North Korean defector, now a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.

“Given this, it is likely that the North Korean troops deployed to Ukraine are not exclusively elite forces,” Park told Newsweek. “While some soldiers may be tasked with psychological warfare operations, most are likely to fill gaps left by Russian forces and act as expendable ‘”cannon fodder.'”

“If these troops are sent into direct combat and suffer heavy casualties, it would effectively amount to a large-scale massacre,” Park said.

The North Korean leader may be less likely to send more elite fighters if casualties rack up anywhere near the rate that Russian troops are sustaining them, Yeo added.

What’s in It for Pyongyang?

For North Korea, these fighters gain combat experience, which they have not been exposed to on a large scale for decades, since an armistice brought an end to the Korean War in 1953.

North Korea may be able to use its personnel to operate weapons in combat conditions, testing them out and working out how to tweak their equipment.

Pyongyang has supplied Moscow with a significant number of missiles and with millions of shells. Its support, Kyiv’s military intelligence chief previously said, makes North Korea the most formidable of Russia’s allies for Ukraine to contend with. Kyiv has doggedly targeted ammunition depots storing North Korean munitions in recent months.

Stumbling Blocks

Coming from North Korea’s cut-off society, there may be issues with communication and working smoothly alongside Russian forces, Yeo said.

“Although North Korean troops are undergoing training in Russian military facilities in the Far East, differences in language, culture, training, and warfighting doctrine, could diminish the effectiveness of North Korean forces until they are better integrated with Russian units,” Yeo said.

Footage published online by Russian and Ukrainian sources appeared to show North Korean soldiers at a Russian training ground in the far-eastern Primorsky region, which borders North Korean territory. The Wall Street Journal, citing analysis of videos circulating online and unnamed intelligence officials, reported that the North Korean soldiers are young and appear to have slight builds, indicating some level of hunger among the ranks coming from the secretive nation.

“North Korean troops are conditioned with unwavering loyalty to their leadership and a unique psychological resilience cultivated by the regime,” designed to fit a sense of “absolute sacrifice for the state” into Pyongyang’s personnel, said Park.

“However, this psychological preparation may not translate effectively into practical resilience in the type of active combat scenarios currently seen in Ukraine, where they would face modernized and highly capable opposition in unfamiliar territory,” Park said.

North Korea may also face morale problems if its troops start sustaining casualty figures approaching those Russian fighters are experiencing, added Yeo.

Pyongyang may also stare down issues with desertion and defection, Yeo noted.

A Ukrainian government-backed hotline, designed for Russian soldiers wishing to surrender as prisoners of war, has published an appeal to North Korean soldiers urging them to “not die senselessly on foreign soil.” The message was published in Korean.

Ukrainian media reported in mid-October that 18 North Korean soldiers had already deserted close to the border with Ukraine, citing anonymous intelligence officials. This could not be independently verified.

“It is possible that some North Korean soldiers who surrender or are captured by Ukrainian forces may not want to return to Russia or North Korea,” Yeo argued. “The defection of North Korean special operation forces would represent an embarrassing blow for the Kim regime.”

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