Why North Korea is sending troops to Russia – and how it risks an ‘escalation spiral’

North Korea is sending troops to military training areas in Russia, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed this week, calling the development a “very, very serious” escalation in the war.

It is a charge that South Korea and Ukraine have made repeatedly in past days, which the United States had yet to corroborate.

Officials in Kyiv last week released a video showing North Korean troops collecting military fatigues at Russian bases. These troops could begin showing up in Russia’s Kursk region – which Ukraine invaded this summer – as early as this week, they say.

Some 3,000 North Korean troops arrived in Russia’s far east earlier this month courtesy of Russian naval transport ships, according to U.S. officials. South Korean intelligence agencies estimate that some 12,000 North Korean troops in total are in training.

“What exactly they’re doing is left to be seen,” Secretary Austin said Wednesday. “We’re trying to gain better fidelity on it.”

Why would North Korea do this?

During a June summit in Pyongyang, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin – in his first visit to the country in nearly a quarter century – signed a mutual defense pact, promising military support if either country is attacked. It was ratified by Russia’s lower parliament Thursday.

Ukraine’s August incursion into Russia’s Kursk region could, by Moscow’s reckoning, constitute such an attack.

Russia of course benefits by getting a boost in forces from North Korea, which, with some 1.3 million troops, has the world’s fourth-largest army.

This is helpful politically for the Kremlin. Within Russia there is growing agitation – “albeit heavily suppressed” – surrounding the massive mobilization of troops from eastern Siberia and inner Mongolia in particular, says Ra Mason, associate professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

“Those people might be somewhat pacified if North Koreans are being used in place of disproportionately used minorities,” he says. Some 600,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in the war, by U.S. estimates.

Fighters are not something that even Russia’s few allies have been willing to provide. Some Central Asian republics have warned their citizens against serving as mercenaries in Russia. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year called out Moscow for operating a “human trafficking network” on the island after trying to recruit its citizens.

In exchange for forces, Moscow may have promised Pyongyang technology for its nuclear program and for intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching U.S. shores, analysts speculate. North Korea also appears determined to launch military spy satellites, known in defense parlance as space-based surveillance systems. The Kremlin could help with this, too.

What’s clear is that “Russia is paying a price” for North Korean aid, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last week. “In return, it means that they have to deliver innovation.”

What difference could North Korean forces make on the battlefield?

Whether these troops will be sent into battle at all is a key question.

Gen. Charles Flynn, the U.S. Army’s top commander in the Pacific, said last week that having North Korean troops on the ground would help provide Pyongyang with “feedback from a real battlefield” – a development he called “very concerning.”

North Korean military engineers may already be aiding in the use and repair of the weapons their country has been sending Russia, which includes missiles and more than a million artillery rounds.

As the bulk of the new forces arrives, analysts believe that many could be sent to a place like Kursk, the site of Kyiv’s cross-border invasion, to fill in for scarce Russian forces there.

This could be easier to justify under international law – in the way that the special forces of Western nations are thought to be advising Ukrainian troops behind the front lines.

Deploying North Korean forces forward in an offensive operation into, say, Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region would be far more likely to trigger an “escalation spiral,” Dr. Mason says.

Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who chairs the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, for instance, said this week “If North Korean troops were to invade Ukraine’s sovereign territory, the United States needs to seriously consider taking direct military action against the North Korean troops.”

“From the NATO and U.S. perspective, if they accept the idea that there are actually North Koreans in the trenches of Donbas, that would create a scenario where they might be compelled to do more to support ailing Ukrainian forces,” he adds. “Russia might want to avoid that.”

What are the implications for the U.S. and other democratic nations – and what might they do about it?

For starters, the revelations have prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to renew his longstanding pleas for allies to lift restrictions on using long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory.

“This escalation on Russia’s part gives greater ammunition to Zelenskyy to say to the Americans, ‘Why are you making us fight with one arm behind our backs?’” says Taras Kuzio, professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine.

The office of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, for its part, has said it will “not sit idly by” while North Korean forces flow into Ukraine. It is now reviewing its policy of sending only nonlethal aid to the embattled nation.

This would diminish the supply of artillery shells that South Korea has instead been sending to the U.S. to bolster American stockpiles, which have been dwindling throughout the war.

More broadly, the deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia raise the larger question of what a collaboration of antidemocratic nations can accomplish – particularly as a destabilizing force.

Though Western officials have been quick to point out that bringing in North Korean troops is an embarrassing sign of Moscow’s serious war struggles – Secretary Austin called it “tin-cupping” – showcasing eastern Russian training camps for North Korean troops allows the Kremlin to “strike fear in an already struggling Ukrainian army and poke its Western backers in the eye,” Dr. Mason notes.

Such tactical moves serve a political purpose. “These associations send a message that Russia won’t be swayed by international opinion,” he adds. “It’s creating what you might describe as an unholy alliance of rogue states.”

This includes China, Iran (a key supplier of drones for Russia), and a now less-isolated North Korea, nations that all delight in upending what they call a U.S.-led unipolar world.

“What they dream of is a return to the Cold War when they believed that there was a multipolar world with different centers of gravity,” Dr. Kuzio says.

Such alliances, like the one now bringing North Korean forces into Russia’s war, “destroy what they see as this kind of very pro-American, very pro-spreading-of-democracy model that’s been around since 1991,” he adds. “So the Western, democratic, ‘end of history’ model, shall we say, will not be the only one in town.”