Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Saturday that he couldn’t confirm reports about North Korean troops being sent to Russia to prepare for fighting in Ukraine, a narrative being pushed hard by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he’s looking for more support from the West.
“I’ve seen those reports in the media. I can’t confirm those reports at this point in time. This is something that we will certainly continue to investigate,” Austin said.
A day earlier, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the alliance had no evidence that North Korean troops were already fighting on the ground in Ukraine. “At this moment, our official position is that we cannot confirm reports that North Koreans are actively now as soldiers engaged in the war effort,” he said.
South Korea’s spy agency claimed in a statement on Friday that North Korea sent 1,500 special operations soldiers to eastern Russia to support the war in Ukraine. Seoul cited satellite images that purported to show a Russian sip moving North Korean soldiers and other images that showed troop formations inside eastern Russia.
The South Korean statement was followed by a video published by Ukraine that purported to show North Korean troops receiving Russian military equipment at a training camp in Russia’s eastern Primorye region, which shares a small border with North Korea.
But the video released by Ukraine has not been independently verified, and even if it showed what the Ukrainians claimed, it would not be evidence that the North Korean soldiers were preparing to fight for Russia.
Zelensky has claimed without evidence that North Korea is preparing to deploy 10,000 troops to join the Russian war effort, a deployment he said would be “the first step to a World War.” In his nightly address on Sunday, Zelensky said he expected Ukraine’s Western backers to have a “strong” response to his claims about North Korean troops.
“Now we have clear evidence that people are being supplied to Russia from North Korea, and these are not just workers for industries, but also military personnel. And we expect a normal, honest, strong reaction from our partners to this. In fact, this is another state joining the war against Ukraine,” Zelensky said.
