Given that Russia loses some 1,000 troops a day on the Ukrainian front, Kim Jong-Un’s generous gift of 10,000 of his own men seems painfully inutile – a military virtue signal, even, demonstrating goodwill and solidarity, but little in the way of actual usefulness. However, being expended, wantonly wasted, is precisely the function of a North Korean soldier. Hailing from the world’s fourth-largest standing military, boasting some 1.2 million members, Putin’s North Korean goons come from a tactical culture permeated not by quality, but by pure quantity.
More than a third of North Korean GDP is spent on the military, but bulk spending does not wise spending make, and especially not lethal technology capable of routing South Korea in a conventional war. The DPRK’s best tanks are domestic copies of the Soviet T-62, whose 115mm smoothbore gun fires 7-8 rounds per minute and reaches a top speed of 30mph on-road; good metrics for the 60s and 70s, but not for the present. The ROK’s fourth-generation MBT, the K2 Black Panther, can fire up to 15 auto-loaded rounds per minute, speeds along roads at upwards of 40mph, and accomplishes this all while being ensconced in modular composite armour fitted with explosive-reactive blocks, so that it can withstand direct hits to the front from a 120mm tank round. Similarly, the DPRK’s largest artillery piece, the 170mm Koksan self-propelled gun, is indeed capable of hitting targets thirty-seven miles away, but deals the regime a veritable financial sucker-punch in doing so, with a comical dud rate of 25%.
In the final instance, North Korean military strategy boils down to mass mobilisation and flinging vast amounts of meat shields at enemy fire, at least before the final nuclear cataclysm takes place. Putin and Kim make natural bedfellows in this sense. After having ruthlessly thrown those at the margins of Russian society – Siberian ethnic minorities and Wagner Group prisoners-turned-mercenaries – into the Bakhmut meat grinder, Putin has now devised the horror of ‘disposable infantry’; poorly-equipped, meth-laden men tasked with identifying Ukrainian firing positions and locating weak points in Ukrainian defences by ‘continuously skirmishing’, by which one should understand ‘dying’, or, in more poetic language, selflessly paving the way for those actually armed with practicable assault weapons to defeat the identified targets.
South Korean intelligence claims that the 10,000-strong North Korean contingent sent to the Russo-Ukrainian front are special forces, part of the DPRK’s secretive XI Corps, but it seems unlikely that they will be used in Russian special operations, having been trained and drilled in a military landscape lagging some forty-odd years behind the present day and being unlikely to possess extensive skills in spoken Russian. All in all, it seems likely that Putin intends to use his human resources gift from Kim as mincemeat. It is telling, perhaps, that the North Koreans were clandestinely moved through Siberia to the Russo-Ukrainian front by being issued fake Russian identity documents identifying them as Buryats, the Mongolic-speaking people of the Republic of Buryatia; precisely the men who were expended in the first wave of Russian assaults in 2022, before Prigozhin offered up a motley crew of murderers, rapists, and other incorrigible anti-socials to the Russian war machine.
Phenotypical similarities aside, both the Buryats and the North Koreans are afflicted at the general population level by serious poverty, to the extent that employment in the Russian Army represents a significant financial incentive. The average monthly salary in Buryatia is $800, while the starting monthly wage in the Russian army is $1800. For the North Koreans, the temptation is even greater, with the average North Korean soldier earning just $1 per month. Even if 90 percent of their Russian wages go straight into Kim’s coffers, they will still be instantly propelled into North Korean affluence – provided they survive, of course. Putin almost certainly felt emboldened to treat his Buryat soldiers with impunity because he knew that this demographic would continue to sign up to the war effort in droves, dreadful treatment notwithstanding, thanks to sheer financial necessity, and the same is likely true with the North Korean trial run, with the question of the delivery of future batches lying wide open.
Even with the luck to survive in the Kursk cauldron, however, Putin’s North Korean expendables may never see their homeland again. Having been exposed to The World Beyond, they are now tainted individuals, cursed with the knowledge of delights utterly unknown to those walled inside the DPRK’s borders. As Gideon Rachman reports, North Korean soldiers have rapidly developed quite the taste for pornography, in a perfect indictment of how the Internet and slavish dedication to a Supreme Leader do not mix. Who knows what else they may have developed a predilection for? Clash of Clans, perhaps, or simply the shocking prospect of voting for their leader (it is unlikely that they have figured out that Russian elections are themselves a sham). Releasing men with awareness of such digital sublimities back into a closed country may be something Kim would rather not risk, and any boost to national pride produced by bringing the proud sons of the DPRK back home for a victory parade could theoretically be accomplished just as effectively with a martyrs’ procession of coffins and blown-up mess dress portraits. However, alarmist voices on Twitter claiming that all surviving North Korean soldiers will be executed at the end of the war may be jumping the gun a little. I find it more likely that the not-so-lucky survivors may live out the rest of their days as actual Siberians – miners in the closed city of Norilsk, perhaps, where they might masquerade as Nenets or Dolgans in a city where foreign eyes will never penetrate. Stripped of their families and all public pride, they may, however, derive scant consolation from the freedom to plumb the Internet’s most unsavoury depths in the wee hours.
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