Kyiv said Ukrainian troops had clashed for the first time with North Korean soldiers in Russia who are deployed alongside Moscow’s military, as western powers and allies in the Asia-Pacific region warned of a “dangerous expansion of the conflict”.
North Korea fired several short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its coast on Tuesday, ramping up tension in the region as the United States began voting in its presidential election, and a Russian rocket attack on the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine killed at least six people and injured 24 others.
Ukraine’s defence minister Rustem Umerov said small-scale clashes between Ukrainian and North Korean troops had taken place recently in the Kursk border region of Russia – where Kyiv’s forces seized about 1,000sq km of territory in August – and he expects five 3,000-strong North Korean units eventually to be deployed along the frontline.
“We still do not see them systematic – so they are part of, let’s say, small engagements rather than the involvement of all troops,” he said in English to South Korea’s KBS television channel.
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“They are being put in the Russian uniforms, they are being trained for the tactical engagement, they are being put under the supervision of the Russian troops,” he added. “They’ve provided them training of a month period, which is now being shortened to several weeks or to one week so they could get engagement in the battlefield.”
Separately, Andriy Kovalenko, the head of the department for countering disinformation at Ukraine’s national security and defence council, said North Korean troops had “already come under fire in Kursk region”.
The Pentagon said on Monday it could not corroborate reports of clashes between Ukrainian and North Korean units, but confirmed that some 10,000 soldiers sent by the Pyongyang dictatorship were now in Kursk region, near Ukraine’s border.
Washington suspects the North Koreans will be used to guard Russian territory, allowing Moscow to send more of its own troops into Ukraine, where the Kremlin’s invasion force is slowly grinding forward in the eastern Donbas area.
Pyongyang’s “direct support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, besides showing Russia’s desperate efforts to compensate its losses, would mark a dangerous expansion of the conflict, with serious consequences for European and Indo-Pacific peace and security”, the foreign ministers of G7 states and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the EU’s foreign policy chief said on Tuesday.
They also condemned in the “strongest possible terms the increasing military co-operation” between Pyongyang and Moscow, including the delivery of North Korean ballistic missiles to Russia, and warned of “the potential for any transfer of nuclear or ballistic missile-related technology” from the Kremlin to the North Korean regime.
Moscow and Pyongyang often hail their deepening relationship but decline to say whether North Korean troops are now reinforcing Russia’s depleted military ranks.
North Korea launched several short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast on Tuesday and condemned recent joint air-force drills conducted by the US, South Korea and Japan, which followed Pyongyang’s test-firing of a huge new intercontinental ballistic missile last week.
In another sign that the Russia-Ukraine war could pull in other states, Lithuanian security officials accused Moscow of being behind an alleged plot to send incendiary packages from the Baltic state to the US and Canada on cargo planes. Poland and Lithuania arrested suspects in the case after parcels exploded at cargo depots in Britain, Germany and Poland in July.
Ukrainian officials said at least six people were killed and 24 injured on Tuesday when a Russian missile hit an unspecified civilian infrastructure site in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.
