Being There in Ukraine

A great deal has been made of the alleged presence of 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia. The West has judged this to be an escalation on the part of Russia—a major escalation.

“That is a major escalation by Russia,” the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. The British Foreign Secretary David Lammy went one “major” further, calling it a “major, major escalation.” Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the insertion of North Korean troops into the war was a “grave escalation.”

This escalation was judged to be so great that, of all the horrors on the battlefield, it was that single move that reportedly tipped the scales in favor of the Biden administration granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles deeper into Russian territory.

The American response mysteriously places great weight on being there. It pretends that the only way a country’s armed forces can participate in the war is by bodily being present on the battlefield. In Ukraine, the U.S. has participated in the war in every way but being there. The U.S. is fighting a proxy war in which, while Russia is bodily there, the U.S. fights with Ukrainian bodies as intermediaries. The U.S. is supplying the financing, the weapons, the weapons maintenance, the weapons training, the wargaming, the intelligence, and the targeting. Ukrainian soldiers, though, provide the bodies doing the fighting and the dying. If North Korea has entered the war by sending bodies, the U.S. has long been in the war in a far more significant way by providing everything but the bodies.

It is not yet established, beyond the statements of American, Ukrainian, and South Korean officials, that there are actually North Korean troops fighting in Russia. There may be. Or there may not be. There may be North Korean troops in Russia for some non-combat role like training. Or they may be fighting in Kursk. But there has been no independent evidence provided for that yet.

Russia lacks motive. The U.S. says that recruiting North Korean troops shows Russia’s lack of manpower and desperation. “This is an indication that [Putin] may be [in even] more trouble than most people realize,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin said. But the Russian armed forces are growing by 30,000 volunteers a month. 10,000 North Koreans represents only about ten days worth of soldiers. Russia is neither desperate for troops in the Donbas, where they are rapidly advancing, nor in Kursk, where U.S. officials say they have amassed a force of tens of thousands of soldiers without having to pull a single soldier out of Ukraine.

The Pentagon and NATO claim to have knowledge that the North Korean troops are elite troops, of the movement of those troops, and that they are disguised as Russians. But, with all that knowledge, they have yet to provide evidence, though it would seemingly be beneficial to call Russia out and put the proof on the table.

On November 21, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “senior North Korean general was wounded in a recent Ukrainian strike in Russia’s Kursk region.” Western officials, though, passed on the opportunity to “disclose how the senior North Korean officer was wounded or his identity.”

On November 25, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Ukrainian officials say 10,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to the Kursk region.” They then add that “no soldiers who talked to the Journal had encountered them in battle.”

Though there may or may not be North Korean troops fighting in Russia, there are Western bodies, military and civilian, in Ukraine.

According to Defense Department documents leaked in March 2023, there were at that time at least 97 NATO special forces in Ukraine: 50 British, 17 Latvian, 15 French, 14 American and 1 Dutch. At the time, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby refused to confirm the number but confirmed “a small U.S. military presence” there.

And there is not only a military presence, but an intelligence presence too. A recent New York Times report revealed that there were “scores” of CIA officers in Ukraine. A transcript of an intercepted February 19 conversation between senior German air force officials exposed that “the English…. have several people on-site.” Scholz has said that there are British and French on the ground in Ukraine, providing targeting information for Western missiles. In March, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski also confirmed that “NATO soldiers are already present in Ukraine.”

And in a recent policy reversal, the Biden administration has authorized deploying U.S. military contractors to Ukraine. The contractors will provide the expertise to maintain and repair complex U.S. supplied weapons systems like the Patriot air defense system and the F-16 fighter jets.

And there is talk in European capitals of pushing the policy of Western boots on the ground in Ukraine even further. Though the idea is likely to face strong opposition, during his November 11 visit to France, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the idea of deploying troops to Ukraine. When he was asked on November 23 if France could deploy troops to Ukraine, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot responded, “We are not ruling out any options.”

There is a fine line between the proxy war the U.S. is fighting in which they provide everything but the troops and the physical presence of North Korean troops. If it turns out that there are North Korean troops fighting in Kursk, the escalation would be more one of quantity than quality.