North Korea benefiting from troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine, US says
Share:
Pyongyang’s military ties with Russia ‘rendering it more capable of waging war against its neighbours’. North Korea is “significantly benefiting” from its troops gaining battlefield experience fighting alongside Russian forces as it makes them more capable of waging war against rivals South Korea and Japan, a US official warned the UN.
Nearly 12,000 North Korean soldiers have been training in Russia and fighting to repel the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region, deputy US ambassador Dorothy Camille Shea told the UN Security Council, which was meeting to discuss Pyongyang’s launch of a new intermediate range hypersonic ballistic missile on Monday.
North Korea “is significantly benefiting from receiving Russian military equipment, technology and experience, rendering it more capable of waging war against its neighbours”, Ms Shea said. "In turn, the DPRK will likely be eager to leverage these improvements to promote weapons sales and military training contracts globally," she said, using the acronym for North Korea’s formal name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Washington last week claimed that more than 1,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Kursk region. The US and the UK have criticised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for sending soldiers to a foreign country to fight its war. The North’s alleged deployment of troops last year to aid the Russian war effort reinforced their diplomatic and military alliance. The two countries signed a comprehensive strategic defence treaty during Mr Putin’s state visit to Pyongyang last year that calls for each side to come to the other’s aid in case of an armed conflict.
