Some 8,000 North Korean troops have reached the Russian border region of Kursk, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday. They are ready to fight Ukrainian forces “in the coming days.”
“We have not yet seen these troops deploy into combat against Ukrainian forces, but we expect that to happen in the coming days,” Blinken added during a joint press conference with the US Defense Minister Lloyd Austin and their South Korean counterparts.
Russia, which has equipped North Korean soldiers with Russian uniforms, has trained troops in artillery, drones, basic infantry operations, including trench clearing, “indicating that it intends to use these forces in front-line operations,” he stressed.
“Make no mistake: if these North Korean troops engage in combat or combat support operations against Ukraine, they will become legitimate military targets,” warned Mr. Austin, saying that this deployment demonstrates “how badly Putin’s war is going”.
New aid
He immediately indicated that the United States was preparing to announce new military aid to Ukraine in the “coming days”. Especially since, according to South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, Pyongyang has supplied more than “1,000 missiles” to Russia and millions of munitions.
Earlier Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized the Western reaction to this deployment. “I think the reaction to this is zero. It’s been zero,” he said in an interview with South Korean media.
Speaking of a “real escalation of the war”, his Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriï Sybiga argued that this should encourage the West to take a “strong decision” aimed at “lifting all restrictions on the use of long-range missiles carried into Russian territory”, which kyiv has been demanding for months.
Discussions between Americans and South Koreans in Washington on Thursday come as North Korea fired one of its most powerful missiles with the stated objective of strengthening its nuclear deterrent.
According to Japan, this missile belongs to “the category of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM)”, which have a range of at least 5,500 kilometers and are generally designed to carry nuclear charges and capable of reaching the territory of the United States .
The North Korean launch “appears to have been carried out to distract attention from international criticism of the deployment of its troops” in Russia, Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in North Korea, told AFP. Seoul. It came hours after Washington and Seoul called on Pyongyang to withdraw its troops from Russia.
North Korea has recently strengthened its military ties with Moscow, with the Russian president making a rare visit to Pyongyang in June, where he signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
