This site noted, four days ago, that there were roughly 3,000 North Korean troops ‘undergoing training at military bases in eastern Russia’, and that John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said those troops would become “legitimate military targets” if they should be used in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Now those troops aren’t quite so far away. From The New York Times:
Ukraine Braces for Russians to Assault With North Korean Troops
Several thousand North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they are expected to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge invading Ukrainian forces.
By Constant Méheut | Monday, October 28, 2024 | 10:53 AM EDT
Kyiv — Ukraine is bracing for assaults involving North Korean soldiers who arrived last week in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they are expected to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge Ukrainian forces who invaded in August.
The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, on Monday confirmed that North Korean troops had been deployed in the Kursk region, saying it represented “a dangerous expansion” of the war. Ukrainian and American officials said last week that several thousand North Korean troops had arrived in the area.
They are part of a larger contingent of up to 10,000 troops that North Korea is preparing to deploy on the Russian side of the front, according to the authorities in Kyiv and Seoul. Military experts say that is too small a number to affect the overall situation on the broader battlefield, where both sides have deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but potentially enough to help Moscow reclaim its territory in the Kursk region.
“As their numbers grow, I expect their impact to be seen by the progress of a steady Russian counterattack,” said John Foreman, a former British defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv.
Read the report carefully: these troops, if used, would supposedly be used “to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge Ukrainian forces who invaded in August.” That means an action not within Ukraine, but inside Russia itself.
On August 6th, Ukrainian troops gained surprise by attacking a thinly defended border region, capturing several Russian towns and small villages. That forces Russia to defend parts of its own territory, which means fewer troops available for the mostly stalemated war inside Ukraine. If there are up to 10,000 North Korean troops, as the Times reported, rather than the 3,000 from the Washington Post story linked above, that could prove decisive in expelling the Ukrainians.
But that also raises the question of John Kirby’s statement: would the North Korean troops be “legitimate military targets” if they were fighting the Ukrainians, but only inside Russia, not across the border in Ukraine? Obviously they would be for the Ukrainian troops, who would be returning fire from them, but then you have the question: would American/NATO weapons be used directly against North Korean troops inside Russia?
The President of the United States is mostly incapacitated, as Joe Biden slowly sinks into dementia. Under any sensible regime, Mr Biden would have resigned, or at least turned things over to the Vice President, until the end of his term, but that hasn’t happened, and the Powers The Be haven’t moved to 25th Amendment him off to the side. One wonders if First Ladt Edith Wilson is really running things.
But the intellectually lightweight Kamala Harris Emhoff running things would be a nightmare: she really has no idea about what’s going on, and while she’s still lucid, something the President is not, she simply shows no aptitude or understanding concerning foreign and war policy; her waffling on Israel and Hamas stand as evidence of that!
One thing about which we can be certain is that, if elected, Donald Trump would not authorize the use of American weapons against North Korean troops inside Russia. He would have no authority over NATO weaponry produced by the other NATO member nations, but at least he wouldn’t try to get the US more deeply involved in a war against a nation with a strategis and tactical nuclear arsenal.