By james art BRUSSELS (AP) — North Korea has sent about 10,000 troops to Russia to train and fight in Ukraine within the “next few weeks,” the Pentagon said Monday, in a move that Western leaders say will escalate the nearly three-year-old war and will shake relations in the Indo-Pacific region.
Some of the North Korean troops have already moved closer to Ukraine, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said, and are believed to be heading toward the Kursk border region, where Russia is struggling to repel a Ukrainian incursion.
Earlier on Monday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed the latest Ukrainian intelligence reports that some North Korean military units are already in the Kursk region.
Adding thousands of North Korean troops to Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II will pile more pressure on Ukraine’s tired and overstretched military. It will also inflame geopolitical tensions on the Korean Peninsula and the wider Indo-Pacific region, including Japan and Australia, Western officials say.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to change global power dynamics. He sought to build a counterbalance to Western influence with a summit of BRICS countries, including the leaders of China and India, in Russia last week. He has sought direct aid for the war from Iran, which has supplied drones, and North Korea, which has sent large quantities of munitions, according to Western governments.
Rutte told reporters in Brussels that the North Korean deployment represented a “significant escalation” of Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict and a “dangerous expansion of Russia’s war.”
President Joe Biden also called the deployment “dangerous.” Very dangerous.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will meet their South Korean counterparts later this week in Washington.
Singh said Austin and Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun would discuss the deployment of North Korean troops to Ukraine. There will be no restrictions on the use of US-provided weapons for these forces, Singh said.
“If we see North Korean troops moving to the front lines, they are co-belligerents in the war,” Singh said, using the acronym for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea. “That’s a calculation that North Korea has to make.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Rutte’s comments and noted that Pyongyang and Moscow signed a joint security pact last June. He did not confirm that North Korean soldiers were in Russia.
Lavrov claims that Western military instructors have long been secretly stationed in Ukraine to help its military use long-range weapons provided by Western partners.
Ukraine, whose defenses are under serious Russian pressure in its eastern region of Donetsk, may receive more grim news from next week’s US presidential election. Donald Trump’s victory could lead to cuts in key US military aid.
In Moscow, the Ministry of Defense announced on Monday that Russian troops had captured the Donetsk village of Tsukurine, the latest settlement to succumb to the slow-moving Russian onslaught.
Rutte spoke in Brussels after a high-level South Korean delegation, including senior intelligence and military officials as well as senior diplomats, briefed the alliance’s 32 national ambassadors at NATO headquarters.
Rutte said NATO was “actively consulting within the alliance, with Ukraine and with our Indo-Pacific partners” about the development. He said he was due to speak with the president of South Korea and the defense minister of Ukraine soon.
“We continue to monitor the situation closely,” he said. He did not take questions after the statement.
The South Koreans showed no evidence of North Korean troops in Kursk, according to European officials who attended the 90-minute exchange and spoke to The Associated Press about the security briefing on condition of anonymity.
It is unclear how and when NATO allies might respond to North Korea’s intervention. They could, for example, remove restrictions that prevent Ukraine from using Western-supplied weapons for long-range strikes on Russian territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, citing intelligence reports, said last Friday that North Korean troops would be on the battlefield within days.
He previously said his government had information that about 10,000 North Korean troops were being prepared to join Russian forces fighting his country.
Days before Zelensky spoke, US and South Korean officials said there was evidence that North Korea had sent troops to Russia.
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Kopp reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Lorne Cook and Tara Kopp, Associated Press