Multiple outlets in Ukraine and South Korea reported this week that communist North Korea is preparing to send military engineers to aid the Russian invasion of Ukraine – reports Pyongyang has not confirmed at press time, but the Pentagon addressed on Tuesday as concerning.
The alarm regarding the potential presence of the North Korean armed forces in the Ukraine war theater follows a brief but consequential visit to Pyongyang by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who signed a mutual defense treaty with his counterpart, communist tyrant Kim Jong-un, that requires either country to act in the event that one of the parties is attacked.
North Korean state media – the only legal source of news in North Korea – celebrated Putin’s visit for days, heralding him as a friend of the communist rogue state. It has also published with increasingly frequency propaganda pieces condemning Ukraine and updating citizens on Ukrainian attacks on Russia, which may constitute actionable events within the text of the mutual defense treaty. Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has publicly offered clarity on what sort of military action could trigger the activation of the treaty.
Initial reports that North Korea may be preparing to intervene in Ukraine surfaced on June 21 on the conservative South Korean network TV Chosun. TV Chosun claimed, citing an anonymous South Korean official, that North Korea would “deploy a large-scale engineering force to occupied Donetsk Oblast as early as July 2024 to assist in rebuilding infrastructure in the occupied city of Donetsk,” according to a translation by Ukrainska Pravda.
Donetsk is one of the two Ukrainian regions and comprise the eastern territory known as the Donbass, where war between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists group simmered for nearly a decade before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Putin annexed Donetsk – alongside the other Donbass territory, Luhansk, and the eastern regions of Kherson and…