North Korean twist in Ukraine war story

The South Korean national intelligence agency briefed lawmakers about the deployment of North Korean troops in the Ukraine war. According to the intelligence agency three thousand North Korean soldiers are being trained in Russia to acclimatise to the weather.

According to the agency, North Korea has promised Russia to send 10,000 troops to the Ukraine front. Pyongyang had denied that there was any deployment and dismissed it as “groundless”. But Moscow has said that defence ties between Russia and North Korea will be boosted.

US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin had spoken in Rome about the North Korean troop deployment on the Ukrainian front. Austin speculated that this showed that the Russian army was under stress. Ukraine’s supporters, the United States and the European members of the NATO have been providing military and economic aid to Ukraine but they have not so far sent their troops. Ukraine’s friends have also not given strategic weapons to be used against Russia in a bid to contain the war.

The West does not want to be seen as pushing Russia to the wall, though it wants Moscow’s troops to be pushed out of Ukraine. It is reckoned that Russia is in control of key eastern parts of Ukraine, including the Crimea which Moscow had annexed in 2014.

The two-day BRICS summit which Russia is hosting in Kazan is likely to mention the two ongoing wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Gaza, to be discussed at the summit and to be mentioned in the joint statement to be issued on Thursday.

Meanwhile, India and China are persuading Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a truce. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Putin that India wants peace between Russia and Ukraine and an end to the war. Chinese President Xi Jinping held closed-door talks with Putin on the Ukraine issue.

There have been clear signs of stress for the Russian troops in the war. Putin said that the army reserves will not be called but they had to be called and asked to go to the battlefront. Then came the participation of the private army Wagner, whose leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, led an aborted coup last June and was killed in a helicopter crash the next month.

The fortunes of the war have been fluctuating, with Russians gaining an upper hand at the beginning of the war in February 2022, and losing it in the winter of the same year. The Ukraine troops held out in the eastern part of the country last year, but they lost ground again. It has been a stalemate and a costly one at that.

Both Ukraine and Russia are looking for an exit from the conflict, but each one wants it on its own terms. Putin insists that Russia would not give up the Ukrainian territory in the east over which Russia has control, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has his own “Victory Plan” for peace, and this includes retrieving every bit of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, from the Russians.

But there is little doubt that two countries are seeking peace and this desire for an end to the war gives an opportunity to countries like China and India to push for a truce. China and Brazil have proposed a truce plan in the United Nations which Ukraine had rejected as being pro-Moscow. There is however the hope that however painfully slow, progress towards a truce will be made as both Russia and Ukraine have realised that this is a war that neither of them could win. The news about the deployment of North Korean troops is to seen as a meter twist in the story.