South Korea is considering directly supplying weapons to Ukraine as evidence increases that North Korean soldiers are preparing to assist Russia in its war against Ukraine.
South Korea’s spy agency (NIS) said last week that North Korea had shipped 1,500 special forces personnel to Russia’s far east for training and acclimatising at local military bases for future combat alongside Moscow’s troops in Ukraine.
Local media, citing the NIS, said Pyongyang had decided to dispatch 12,000 troops, formed into four brigades, to Russia.
A senior official at the office of South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said on Tuesday that Seoul could consider providing defensive and lethal weapons to Ukraine depending on developments.
“We would consider supplying weapons for defensive purposes as part of the step-by-step scenarios, and if it seems they are going too far, we might also consider offensive use,” the presidential official told reporters, signalling Seoul’s most proactive position towards arming Ukraine to date.
The development underscores the potential for a divided Korean peninsula to become entangled in the conflict.
The president’s comment came after South Korea’s national security council held an emergency meeting to explore its responses over North Korea’s increasing military ties with Russia.
South Korea, home to some of the world’s largest stockpiles of artillery shells, has provided humanitarian aid and other support to Ukraine, while joining western-led economic sanctions against Moscow.
But it has not directly provided arms to Kyiv, citing a longstanding policy of not supplying weapons to countries actively engaged in conflict.
Seoul’s policy shift would be welcomed by Kyiv, which is facing a desperate shortage of munitions. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, earlier called for a “strong response” from international partners to North Korea’s involvement in the ongoing war.
Meanwhile, a series of clips have surfaced over the past few days, reportedly showing North Korean soldiers training in Russia.
On Sunday, the Ukrainian strategic communication and information security centre circulated a video appearing to show North Korean soldiers receiving uniforms and equipment at the Sergeevka training ground in the far east of Russia.
Astra, an independent Russian outlet, published two clips on Tuesday of what appear to be North Korean soldiers standing outside a military base. The men are heard speaking in Korean, with an instructor telling soldiers to “come inside” the building.
Independent researchers have geolocated the clips to the Sergeevka training ground.
The Kremlin has declined to directly answer a question on whether or not North Korean troops were going to fight in Ukraine but said that it was Moscow’s sovereign right to develop ties with Pyongyang in all areas.
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who first met in 2019, have been seeking greater military and economic cooperation to counter their growing international isolation prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes. In June, the two leaders signed a pact that includes a clause requiring the countries to come to each other’s aid if either is attacked.
The UK on Monday said that it “assesses that it is highly likely North Korea has agreed to send troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine”.
“It seems that the harder Putin finds it to recruit Russians to be cannon fodder, the more willing he is to rely on the DPRK [North Korea] in his illegal war,” Dame Barbara Woodward, the permanent UK representative to the United Nations, said while speaking in New York.
“Putin is clearly desperate. His desperation is a danger to us all.”