Around 8,000 North Korean troops expected to enter battlefield in coming days, says US
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North Korea will back Russia until it achieves victory in the Ukraine war, Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said on Friday at talks in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“Our traditional, historically friendly relations, which have travelled the tested path of history, today … are rising to a new level of relations of invincible military comradeship,” she told Lavrov praising Vladimir Putin’s “wise leadership” in the war.
It came as US secretary of state Antony Blinken said thousands of North Korea’s soldiers fighting inside Putin’s “meat grinder” war will be a legitimate military target.
The top US diplomat said that the North Korean soldiers will enter the war in Ukraine in the “coming days” as he confirmed there are 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia, including as many as 8,000 in the Kursk region.
On the war front, at least three people, including a 12-year-old boy and a teenager, were killed in a Russian-guided bomb strike on Kharkiv. A child aged 12 was among the dead in the Wednesday evening strike, and thirty-six people were injured.
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Andy Gregory2 November 2024 03:00
Ukraine’s Zelensky calls on Western allies to stop watching and start acting on North Korea
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukraine’s allies to stop “watching” and take action over the presence of North Korean troops in Russia before they start confronting his country in combat.
Mr Zelensky, in a video posted on Telegram, said North Korea had made progress in its military capability, missile deployment and weapons production and “now unfortunately they will learn modern warfare”.
“The first thousands of soldiers from North Korea are near the Ukrainian border. Ukrainians will be forced to defend themselves against them,” he said. “And the world will watch again.”
Mr Zelensky said Ukraine had pinpointed every location where North Korean soldiers were posted in Russia. But Kyiv’s Western allies, he said, had not supplied the long-range weapons needed to strike them.
“But instead of such necessary long-range capability, America watches, Britain watches, Germany watches…,” he said.
“Everyone in the world who truly wants the Russian war against Ukraine not to expand….must not just watch. They must act. Words about the inadmissibility of escalation and expansion of war must be matched with actions.”
The slick three-minute video interspersed his comments with images of North Korea’s soldiers and missile launches as well as images of the war and the United Nations.
The video follows an interview with South Korea’s KBS television on Thursday in which Mr Zelensky blasted what he described as his allies’ “zero” response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops.
Shweta Sharma2 November 2024 02:51
Russia claims UK using Black Sea corridor to supply Ukraine with arms
Russia has claimed Britain is using a Black Sea grain corridor to deliver arms to Ukraine, after denying London’s allegations that Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports had disrupted crucial grain supplies for other countries.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said last week that an increase in Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports was delaying vital aid reaching the Palestinians and stopping crucial grain supplies from being delivered to the global south.
The United Nations said last week that Russian attacks on Ukrainian Black Sea ports had damaged six civilian vessels as well as grain infrastructure since 1 September, calling the ramp-up in strikes “distressing”.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that Starmer’s allegations that Moscow was damaging global food security with such strikes were wide of the mark.
“Such baseless yet thunderous outrage from London once again confirms just the opposite: the direct involvement of the UK in supplying arms to the Kiev regime using the Black Sea sea corridor,” she alleged in a press briefing.
Zakharova referred to what she said was recent video evidence concerning the port of Yuzhny, in Ukraine’s Odesa region, and purported arms supplies published by Russia’s Ministry of Defence.
Her claims could not be independently verified and there was no immediate response to them from London.
Andy Gregory2 November 2024 02:00
North Korea boasts of its new long-range missile targeting the US
Andy Gregory2 November 2024 01:00
Trump claims those considering him a ‘friend of Russia’ are ‘sick’
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has claimed those who consider him “a friend of Russia” are “sick”, amid fears over Washington’s backing for Ukraine should he re-enter the White House after next week’s vote.
Speaking to right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, who in February interviewed Vladimir Putin and filmed a bizarre segment praising Russian supermarkets while in Moscow, Mr Trump said: “They love to say that I was a friend of Russia. I worked for Russia, I was a Russian spy – these people are sick.”
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 23:59
Video report: Russia fines Google $2.5 decillion (that’s 2.5 trillion trillion trillion dollars)
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 23:00
North Korean soldiers will likely be paid up to $2,400 for year’s fighting in Ukraine
Despite a gradual economic recovery in North Korean over the past 30 years, defectors say the average monthly wage for ordinary North Korean workers and soldiers is less than $1.
They say many people engage in capitalist market activities to make a living because the country’s state rationing system remains largely broken.
Russia is expected to pay all the costs related to the deployment of North Korean troops, including their wages, which observers estimate will be at least $2,000 per month for each person.
Around 90 to 95 per cent of their stipends will likely go to Mr Kim’s coffers, and the rest to the soldiers. This means one year of service in Russia would earn a North Korean soldier $1,200 to $2,400. That’s big enough to prompt many young soldiers to volunteer for risky Russian tours, former soldiers say.
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 22:00
Kim Jong Un ‘taking a big gamble’, analyst says
Large North Korean troop casualties in Ukraine or Russia would be a major political blow for the country’s 40-year-old ruler, Kim Jong Un.
But experts say Mr Kim may see this as a way to get much needed foreign currency and security support from Russia in return for joining the war.
“Kim Jong Un is taking a big gamble. If there are no large casualty numbers, he will get what he wants to some extent. But things will change a lot if many of his soldiers die in battle,” Ahn Chan-il, a former North Korean army first lieutenant who leads the World Institute for North Korean Studies, told the Associated Press.
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 21:00
Former North Korean soldiers on why troops will volunteer to fight in Ukraine
The thousands of young soldiers North Korea has sent to Russia, reportedly to help fight against Ukraine, are mostly elite special forces, but that hasn’t stopped speculation they’ll be slaughtered because they have no combat experience, no familiarity with the terrain and will likely be dropped onto the most ferocious battlefields.
That may be true, and soon. Observers say the troops are already arriving at the front. From the North Korean perspective, however, these soldiers might not be as miserable as outsiders think.
They may, in fact, view their Russian tour with pride and as a rare chance to make good money, see a foreign country for the first time, and win preferred treatment for their families back home, according to former North Korean soldiers.
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 20:00
Why are North Koreans troops in Ukraine?
The Pentagon has said that North Korea dispatched 10,000 troops to Russia, with some of them believed to be heading to the Kursk border to join Vladimir Putin’s forces in their invasion of Ukraine amid the biggest conflict Europe has seen since the Second World War.
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said some North Korean soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine and were believed to be heading for the Kursk border region. The Russian forces are facing difficulty in pushing back Ukraine’s cross-border incursion launched on 6 August.
This came within hours of Nato secretary general Mark Rutte confirming recent Ukrainian intelligence reports of the presence of North Korean military units deployed to Kursk near the Ukrainian border.
Andy Gregory1 November 2024 19:00
