North Korean arms more significant than troops in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, got to the point in his presidential address last night: “Another state,” he said, was “joining the war against Ukraine”. He was referring to the growing intelligence that shows elite soldiers from North Korea are in Russia preparing to join what has become a fight that, in effect, extends all the way across Asia.The effect will be greater than the numbers believed to be involved. On Friday, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported that 1,500 members of Pyongyang’s special forces had crossed the border to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east to begin training and some degree of participation in the war in Ukraine.In the past, isolated North Korea has sent pilots to Egypt, where they fought against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and to Vietnam, where some flew sorties in secret against the US forces. But Pyongyang has never deployed such a large number of its troops abroad.They represent the first element of…