By Andrew Salmon (The Washington Times)
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea is preparing to deploy 30,000 fresh troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while claiming that Moscow is preparing to mobilize Russians to boost its flagging campaign.
Russia needs combat troops, and North Korea, with the world’s fourth-largest army, has more than 1 million active troops. The economically challenged regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, meanwhile, has been selling so many arms to Russia that the value of the exports over three years likely exceeds its annual gross domestic product.
“Russia wants to receive another 30,000 troops from North Korea,” the Ukrainian leader wrote on X Sunday in advance of his scheduled trip this week to Washington to meet with President Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and longtime defender of Ukraine. “Since June, preparations have been underway in Russia’s Voronezh region to receive them.”
Voronezh, a transportation hub southeast of Moscow, lies about 95 miles from the Ukrainian border.
It offers transportation links to Kursk, where North Korean troops fought from November 2024 to March 2025, as well as to Belgorod, a front-line Russian city, and Rostov, a key staging area for Russian operations in Ukraine’s south and southeast.
Russian President Vladimir Putin desperately needs a battlefield breakthrough after months of increasingly sophisticated and damaging Ukrainian drone attacks on infrastructure deep inside Russia.
At the front, indications are that “kontraktniki” — Russia’s contracted, volunteer soldiers — are being reduced faster than they can be recruited.
Mr. Zelenskyy said Friday that Kyiv has learned that Moscow is preparing another round of mobilizations to replace soldiers who have been lost. On Saturday, the Ukrainian president said Moscow has enlisted 221,000 soldiers this year and sustained nearly 225,500 losses.
A recent visitor to the Russian Far East told The Washington Times that recruiting stations are open around the clock in a bid, apparently, to lure late-night candidates for the armed services — especially those who might be under the influence of alcohol.
The Kremlin, apparently taken aback by Ukraine’s forceful resistance to its February 2022 invasion, mobilized 300,000 reservists in September 2022.
However, perhaps concerned about fueling the kind of grassroots pushback that undercut the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 Afghanistan campaign, Moscow has not deployed conscripts against Ukraine.
Andrey Kartapolov, chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, dismissed talk Monday of another mobilization as “rumors,” according to Russia’s Tass news agency.
Kim’s Expendables
In tightly controlled North Korea, there is no likelihood of pushback, especially since Mr. Kim has personally honored veterans and families of the fallen with emotive meetings and a new war memorial.
Mr. Zelenskyy said North Korea is also preparing to transport additional ballistic missile launchers to Russia.
Although Iran has supplied drones to Russia, North Korea has been Russia’s biggest overseas supplier of artillery and missile munitions.
Ukrainian media report that, thanks to real-war experience and Russia’s likely technical aid, North Korea’s tactical ballistic missiles have greatly improved their accuracy from earlier in the war.
“This is a threat not only to Ukraine,” Mr. Zelenskyy said. “Russia is helping North Korea learn how to wage war, improve its weapons, and gain real combat experience in using them.”
Pyongyang’s troops had not fought a major war since the Korean War ended in 1953, but they have gained up-to-the-minute experience thanks to the deployment of up to 15,000 combat troops from elite North Korean units who, in 2024, helped the Russians repel a Ukrainian incursion in Kursk.
A 2024 treaty signed in Pyongyang by Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim called for mutual defense if sovereign territory, such as Kursk, was attacked.
Whether recent contacts between officials from the troop-rich city of Pyongyang and the manpower-poor city of Moscow altered those terms is unknown.
Though 30,000 bayonets would be a massive deployment for most capitals, for Pyongyang and its 1.2-million-strong military, it is minimalist. An estimated 200,000 of those soldiers are considered crack troops.
Those units demonstrated high-casualty tolerance in the 2024 action amid massive, albeit unconfirmed, losses, but earned the respect of Ukrainian troops for their speed, physical fitness and marksmanship.
Their refusal to be taken alive also won alarmed notice. Only two POWs were captured in Kursk. Others, incapacitated, killed themselves with explosives.
Having adapted to a drone-centric battleground, North Korea’s army possesses not just greater numbers but also superior experience to its South Korean counterparts.
Seoul’s forces have not engaged in large-scale operations since withdrawing from Vietnam in 1973.
After Kursk’s recapture, North Korean troops are not believed to have reengaged in ground combat. However, Ukrainian reports from early this year stated that North Korean artillery units were firing across the Russian border, while engineers were conducting demining and ordnance clearances.
War Bonanza
Sales to Mr. Putin’s war machine are a windfall for Mr. Kim that is far more valuable than is widely known, said Bruce Bechtol, who teaches political science at Angelo State University in Texas and who studies North Korean arms exports.
Citing Seoul’s Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, Mr. Bechtol said North Korea earned $20 billion from Russia from August 2023 to March 2025 by shipping 20,000 container loads of arms.
The exports had risen to 33,000 containers by March 2026, Mr. Bechtol said, calling it “a staggering number.”
The containers hold artillery pieces, shells, multiple-launch rocket systems, anti-tank missiles and small arms, as well as the short-range ballistic missiles referenced by Mr. Zelenskyy.
The sums paid are massive by the standards of Pyongyang’s modest macro economy.
“North Korea’s unclassified GDP is roughly $26 billion a year,” Mr. Bechtol said. “This proliferation to this one country, sending them weapons systems and munitions … is the basis for an incredibly important relationship.”
It is not just cash. Moscow is supplying Pyongyang with “badly needed foodstuffs, oil, military equipment and upgraded systems, technological support, and has even constructed new factories for the North, including drones,” Mr. Bechtol said.
It is unknown how Mr. Kim’s combat troops are paid by Moscow. Mr. Zelenskyy offered no information about which arm of the military the incoming troops hail from or their mission.
“All of this is a threat to everyone in Asia who is within range of North Korean missiles,” Mr. Zelenskyy concluded.
Seoul’s Nonresponse
That includes South Korea and Japan. Both democracies have supplied nonlethal equipment to Ukraine but no arms.
Ukrainian intelligence has consistently reported ahead of Western or South Korean agencies when it comes to details of North Korean actions alongside Russia.
“The government is closely monitoring developments related to military cooperation between North Korea and Russia,” the South Korean Foreign Ministry said, according to Yonhap News Agency, after Mr. Zelenskyy’s statement. “Military cooperation between North Korea and Russia in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions must be stopped immediately.”
Since taking office in June 2025, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s administration has sought to open negotiations with North Korea. Relations have been frozen since 2019.
Pyongyang, fortified by its alliance with Moscow and an apparently increasingly equitable relationship with Beijing, has turned a deaf ear.
Last week, Seoul dropped its insistence on denuclearization as its foremost priority. The new stance is “peace first” rather than “denuclearization first,” Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said.
This article was made available to WMAL via The Washington Times.
