North Korea will be sending 5,000 military construction troops and 1,000 sappers to Russia’s war-torn Kursk oblast, an action confirmed by senior Kremlin official and presidential security adviser Sergei Shoigu. The deployment comes after active reconstruction efforts following the area being badly damaged in a Ukrainian military incursion last August.
Shoigu visited the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang on Tuesday to make the agreement official. The two agreed on a “special military operation” as well as greater cooperation on rebuilding strategic facilities along the border, KCNA reported. It is Shoigu’s second trip to North Korea within less than three months.
The summit also covered commemorating North Korean troops who were fighting together with Russian troops in Kursk. In April, President Vladimir Putin had credited Russian and North Korean soldiers for pushing Ukrainian forces back together, although Kyiv denied giving up land in the area.
The sending of workers is in addition to the increasing military cooperation between the two nations. North Korea has already acknowledged sending more than 10,000 troops to Russia, while British intelligence believed that more than 6,000 were killed or wounded during combat.
South Korea denounced the latest action, accusing it of infringing on UN sanctions. Its foreign ministry urged Pyongyang to stop such cooperation with Moscow immediately. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba concurred at the G7 summit in Canada to enhance coordination on the activities of North Korea.
Western intelligence agencies have also voiced concern over North Korea’s increasingly military role in the conflict, its biggest foreign engagement since the Korean War. The “militant friendship” with Russia, as North Korean officials refer to it, is interpreted as a portent of strengthening relationships between the two pariah nations against the background of international condemnation.
