A tank from the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade.
Russian state media capture
As many as 8,000 North Korean troops have deployed to Kursk Oblast in western Russia, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday. U.S. intelligence indicates the North Koreans will join the fighting along the 270-square-mile salient that Ukrainian forces carved out of Kursk starting in August. “We would expect that to happen in the coming days,” Blinken said.
The North Korean deployment could add weight to Russian attacks in Kursk and help accrue valuable experience for Pyongyang’s army, which hasn’t fought a major war in 70 years. But it’s also possible the deployment has no impact on the front line, and just gets a lot of North Koreans killed without anyone learning anything.
It’s not for no reason that the Kremlin has steered those North Korean reinforcements to Kursk. Last month, Russian forces counterattacked the Ukrainian salient in the oblast. The Russians have advanced a short distance on the salient’s western side. But on the eastern side, they’re getting massacred by Ukrainian troops firing from fortifications the Ukrainians apparently captured from the Russians back in August.
The Russian navy’s 810th Naval Infantry Brigade is responsible for the main counterattack along the salient’s eastern edge. The 2,000-man brigade has suffered heavily in recent days. On or just before Oct. 24, the brigade’s 382nd Separate Battalion sent 16 scouts to probe Ukrainian positions, apparently around Russkaya Konopelka or nearby settlements.
“Our objective was to discover the enemy,” one of the scouts explained in a video translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated. “We did that,” the scout said. He and his 15 comrades radioed back the location of a Ukrainian machine gun position, presumably nestled in one of the many defensive earthworks advancing Ukrainian troops captured from Kursk’s surprised Russian garrison back in August.
But then the battalion or brigade commanders did something unexpected. They ordered the lightly-armed scouts to directly attack the machine gun nest. “The enemy had a huge numerical superiority,” the scout explained. “We had four groups of four people. Two groups stopped existing.”
The survivors threatened to mutiny. “We don’t want to serve in this battalion any more,” the scout said. “We won’t be cannon fodder.”
Help is coming in the form of what amounts to several regiments of North Korean troops. Whether the North Korean soldiers will succeed where the Russian marines have failed in Kursk remains to be seen. But it’s an ominous sign that, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., the Russians have assigned just one interpreter to every 30 or so North Koreans.
It’s possible that the Russian commanders don’t expect to closely coordinate with the North Korean platoons. Instead, Russian officers might just issue simple, broad commands—and then hope for the best. That kind of blunt command and control is what got those 810th Naval Infantry Brigade scouts killed in a pointless direct attack on entrenched Ukrainians. It could get a lot of North Koreans killed, too.
According to ISW, Pyongyang is eager for its troops to gain combat experience. If so, the war is in essence a very dangerous training exercise for those North Koreans in Kursk. The risk, of course, is that the North Koreans will learn what those Russian marines learned recently: that their commanders are cruel, ignorant or both—and that following stupid orders from uncaring officers is bad for your health.
“If the Russian command decided to use North Korean personnel in such a manner as ‘cannon fodder,’ and not utilize the specialist training of certain North Korean units,” ISW mused, “the casualties that North Korean troops are sure to accrue will undermine whatever battlefield lessons Pyongyang hopes to learn.”