International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, Balkans and around the world. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura, Professor of International Politics and National Security, Faculty of Law, St. Andrew's University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) and member of IFIMES Council prepared an article entitled “Breaking echo chamber effects in North Korea analysis” about the relationship between Russia and North Korea and the impact on the war in Ukraine. The article is published in its entirety.
Amid rampant government war propaganda and counter-propaganda, mainstream Western media have reported that North Korea dispatched some 12,000 infantry of its special operations forces to Russia’s rollback operations in its Kursk Oblast against Ukrainian invasion forces. Almost all of the reports similarly point out Pyongyang’s substantial contribution to Russia’s aggression to Ukraine, using its soldiers as “cannon fodder,” and warn of plausible dangers leading to cross-regional dynamics toward a Third World War.
Under the new bilateral security pact of the last year, there is a strong give-and-take relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang, both of which suffer bottlenecks in defense and national security policies. The former can significantly supplement force generation in the current state of a limited mobilization, while the latter can obtain some Russian critical technologies related to nuclear warhead and ICBM as well as provision of oil and foods.
In hindsight, the pact is obviously geared more to the above give-and-take than to Moscow’s security guarantee to Pyongyang as found in the automatic intervention clause of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (1961-1996). In fact, the Russian constitution requires the President to secure prior consent of the upper house to send armed forces oversea. Thus, for a foreseeable future, the pact would hardly embolden Pyongyang to commit adventurism, without Moscow’s explicit commitment to extended nuclear deterrence for Pyongyang. Also, Pyongyang is recently taking a highly defensive military posture vis-à-vis South Korea, such as placing land minds on the 38 parallel, blowing up inter-Korean railway tracks immediately north of the parallel, and broadcasting propaganda through loudspeakers in border areas. The treaty-based alliance stabilizes inter-Korean confrontation because Pyongyang is now firmly put on Russia’s orbit, unless the U.S.-led West should attempt a regime change.
This prospect will hold insofar as the ongoing multi-polarization of international politics continues. On one hand, the time is on Moscow’s side in that the protracted war in Ukraine has accelerated energy, crops, raw material, and other cost-push inflation, having caused the severe economic, social, and political decline of the U.S.-led West in parallel with the firmer Russia-China strategic alignment against the U.S.-led West and the substantial risings of major Global South powers. On the other hand, the time works against Moscow in that Russia would substantially deepen its economic dependency on China to weather West’s collective economic sanctions. Consequently, Moscow has to constantly recalibrate the balance between the two aspects.
In these contexts, Moscow has taken advantage of 12,000 North Korean infantry to supplement inadequate force generation because full mobilization is domestic-politically inhibitive, given the “special military operations” status of the war in Ukraine, that is short of a war. Certainly, Moscow seems to have recruited 100,000 to 150,000 volunteers in addition to the existing 500,000 effectives and created a new army corps, a division and two combined-arms forces, together with a major reorganization at the army division and brigade levels. Deploying an only one division of 50,000 effectives to the Kursk is feasible since the major fronts lie in the Donbas/eastern Ukraine. Making up 10,000 effectives out 50,000 is significant, giving Moscow adequate flexibility in war planning.
In addition to military technology transfers, what else can Pyongyang expect from dispatching the troops? Western media are biased for most current combat experience allegedly available in the Russia-Ukraine asymmetric warfare. Yet, Pyongyang can obtain little valuable experience because its special operation forces need to be trained for guerilla and urban warfare, not large-scale organized combat in plains. Neither is Pyongyang is able to learn meaningful unit-operational knowledge given that its battalions are embedded in the command & control structure of the Russian military
Conversely, how can Pyongyang ignore serious attrition of special operations forces as a most important warfighting asset? Purportedly, Pyongyang has just sent, to the Kursk, unexperienced soldiers only with basic training, not elite segments of the forces, consuming them as if “cannon fodder.”
However, the value of human life varies across counties and political regimes, and that of North Korea is extremely cheap. Western analytical approach to North Korea is in thrall to the mirror image of Western standards and practice and is completely off the mark.
Specifically, the “cannon fodder” option is most rational for Pyongyang because it has made a basic strategic shift to South Korea last year, with the constitutional amendment designating it as a hostile state, no longer a part of the Peninsula to be unified. This means that Pyongyang may use nuclear weapons against South Korea’s far superior conventional warfighting capability. This will free Pyongyang from investing in its large and poorly armed conventional forces, out of the severely impoverished economy that has been dwarfed by South Korea. Furthermore, Pyongyang’s cash thirst can be alleviated since the regime takes a substantial rake-off of the Russian government’s bounties, purportedly, 30,000 U.S. dollars per a soldier. Obviously, the option serves multiple purposes.
In a nutshell, both Moscow and Pyongyang retain instrumental rationality, while having realistically grasped the evolving structural metamorphosis of world politics toward multipolarity. It is time that Western analysts extricate themselves from the mirror-image perspective and self-poisoning uniformity of thought that are in affinity with moral judgement against Russian aggression to Ukraine. Rather, the mental toughness to coexist with the evils for a foreseeable future is essential.
About the author:
Prof. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics and National Security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, and currently a 2024 ROC-MOFA Taiwan Fellow-in-Residence at NCCU-IIR Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei. He is Member of IFIMES Council.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Osaka, February 3, 2025
[1] IFIMES - International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”, link: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en
