Seoul Eyes Arms for Ukraine Over Alleged North Korean Deployment

(Bloomberg) -- South Korea has raised the prospect of sending weapons to Ukraine, in response to North Korea’s reported dispatch of troops to Russia to support Moscow’s war on Ukraine, underscoring the risk of a divided Korean peninsula getting dragged into the conflict.

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South Korea’s National Security Council held an emergency meeting on Tuesday and asked North Korea to immediately withdraw troops, it said in a statement. Seoul could consider providing weapons to Ukraine depending on developments, a senior presidential official told reporters.

“The government will take corresponding measures step by step depending on the progress of military cooperation between Russia and North Korea,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s office said in a statement.

In recent days, South Korea has been raising alarm over North Korea’s reported move, which if confirmed would mark a further deepening of military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. On Monday, South Korean foreign minister summoned Russian ambassador in Seoul and strongly urged Moscow to immediately pull out North Korean soldiers and end their cooperation.

There are conflicting claims about the size of the potential deployment but South Korea’s spy agency said last week that 1,500 North Korean troops arrived in Russia this month with a second batch of troops likely to be transported soon.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told reporters in Brussels last week that Pyongyang is preparing to send 10,000 troops even as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said there was no evidence North Korean soldiers are involved in the fight.

Western officials are taking a much more cautious approach to ascertaining the scale of North Korea’s involvement in the conflict, with a key unanswered question being whether their function is more on the engineering side, for example, rather than direct combat.

After a phone conversation with Yoon on Monday, Rutte said on X, formerly Twitter, that North Korea sending troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine would mark a “significant escalation.” Yoon called the growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang a “threat” to world security and vowed not to sit idle.

The provision, should it be considered and approved, would mark an end to South Korea’s policy banning lethal aid to Ukraine. If some of Seoul’s large store of artillery shells started heading to Kyiv in addition to weapons supplies from Pyongyang to Russia, that would result in the war drawing upon two of the world’s largest artillery forces.

The reports of deployment quickly raised concerns in South Korea over what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would get in return for the alleged troops dispatch. Kim has been already getting aid from Russia to prop up North Korea’s ailing economy and advance its weapons programs in return for providing artillery shells and ballistic missiles, according to Seoul and Washington.

North Korean soldiers’ direct participation in the conflict could have wider implications apart from tipping the balance in Russia’s favor, according to a Global Insight report produced by Bloomberg analysts. It said any North Korean involvement is likely to provoke a response from Ukraine’s partners, and likely expand sanctions against Russia.

The deployment, if confirmed, would be a major step in Pyongyang’s cooperation with Moscow after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kim agreed in June to provide immediate military assistance if one of them is attacked. North Korea maintains around 1.28 million active troops, according to South Korea’s defense white paper.

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