With thousands of North Korean troops deployed to Russia for likely action against Ukraine, there are looming questions about how well the fighters, who have no combat experience, will perform.

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

Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence have said in recent weeks that North Korea is sending between 10,000 and 12,000 troops to Russia to support Moscow’s war effort against Kiev.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that he told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were on “Russian training grounds in close proximity to the war zone.”

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

Washington said they would be “legitimate military targets” and the US representative to the UN, Robert Wood, said if North Korean troops “went into Ukraine in support of Russia, they would certainly come back in body bags”.

How will Russia benefit from North Korean fighters?

There are some clear advantages to North Korean troops augmenting Russia’s ranks at this point in the war.

Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies in Washington, DC, said Newsweek: “North Korean troops will give Russia an immediate boost by sheer virtue of increasing Russian frontline manpower.”

More than two and a half years into a grueling war, both Kiev and Moscow are looking for ways to replenish their tired ranks while sidestepping unpopular moves such as a wave of mobilization or scrapping the conscription age to includes younger recruits.

The head of the National Security Council in Kyiv, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, told Ukrainian lawmakers earlier this week that Ukraine would draft an additional 160,000 people into the army.

Russia, in particular, has leaned heavily on tactics called “meat grinder” attacks in Ukraine, racking up huge casualties with infantry-led attacks to overwhelm defenses. It has made slow but steady gains in war-torn eastern Ukraine throughout this year. Russia announced on Wednesday that it had captured Selydove, a town in eastern Donetsk region near Pokrovsk, a key logistical hub for Kiev.

According to Ukraine’s figures, Russia has suffered nearly 700,000 casualties since February 2022. Western estimates put the death toll in Moscow at around 610,000, with September the bloodiest month on record.

A senior Estonian intelligence official said in late October that Russian losses could reach 40,000 for the month. US figures suggest that Moscow is able to attract around 30,000 new recruits each month.

Although the current number of North Korean troops would represent a small percentage of Russian forces in Ukraine, according to the US think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, they could still “free up Russian troops to conduct offensives and counteroffensives that Russia it focuses on,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, professor of international relations at King’s College London.

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

Despite being unfamiliar with Russian territory and weapons stockpiles, they likely won’t need extensive training on the guns, rifles, mortars and other explosives Russia is using against Ukraine, Pacheco Pardo argued.

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

Kiev’s surprise incursion into the Kursk region on the Russian border nearly three months ago caught Russia and many international observers by surprise. Moscow has yet to remove Kiev’s stranglehold on the area it controls in Russia, known as the Ukrainian salient, although it has retaken some of the territory Ukraine seized in the summer in recent weeks.

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

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

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

They are “definitely better prepared to fight than Russian recruits with little or no military experience,” Yeo said. “But it’s not clear whether Kim Jong Un will send an entire corps of elite troops.”

“Based on what other militaries are doing, these deployed troops will be well trained and equipped because they have an immediate ‘real world’ mission and not an ‘on call’ mission,” CSIS assessed.

Many who go through the North Korean military end up in non-military jobs such as farming and construction without much intensive combat training, Ji Hyun Park, a North Korean defector now a senior fellow for human security at Center for Asia. Pacific Strategy.

“With this in mind, it is likely that the North Korean troops deployed in Ukraine are not exclusively elite forces,” Park said. 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 losses, 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 pile up close to the rate Russian troops are sustaining them, Yeo added.

What’s in it for Pyongyang?

For North Korea, these fighters are gaining combat experience they haven’t been exposed to on a large scale in decades, since an armistice ended the Korean War in 1953.

North Korea could use its personnel to operate weapons under combat conditions, testing them and developing how to modify their equipment.

Pyongyang has supplied Moscow with a significant number of missiles and millions of shells. Its support, the head of military intelligence in Kiev previously said, makes North Korea the most formidable ally of Russia for Ukraine to face. Kiev has persistently targeted ammunition depots storing North Korean munitions in recent months.

Stumbling blocks

Coming from North Korea’s isolated society, there can be problems communicating and working seamlessly alongside Russian forces, Yeo said.

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

Images published online by Russian and Ukrainian sources appear to show North Korean soldiers at a Russian training ground in the Primorsky region in the far east, which borders North Korean territory. The Wall Street Journal, citing analysis of videos circulating online and anonymous intelligence officials, reported that North Korean soldiers are young and appear to be of slight build, indicating a certain level of hunger in the ranks that hail from the secretive nation.

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

“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 could also face morale problems if its troops begin to sustain casualty numbers approaching the Russian fighters they face, Yeo added.

Pyongyang may also be looking down on defection and defection issues, Yeo noted.

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

Ukrainian media reported in mid-October that 18 North Korean soldiers had already defected near the Ukrainian border, citing unnamed intelligence officials. This could not be independently verified.

“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 operations forces would be an embarrassing blow to the Kim regime.”