President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that it was Russia’s business whether or not it decided to use North Korean troops and said that if Ukraine wanted to join NATO then Moscow could do what it wanted to ensure its own security.

The United States said on Wednesday that it had seen evidence that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia for possible deployment in Ukraine, a move that the West is casting as a significant escalation of the Ukraine war.

Ukraine’s military intelligence service said that the first North Korean units trained in Russia had been deployed in the Kursk region, a Russian border area where Ukrainian forces took a chunk of Russian land in August.

  • einkorn@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    NATO maintains that it is a defensive alliance. If NATO starts adding countries Russia is currently at war with, it becomes an offensive alliance.

    I don’t think so. Ukraine is in a defensive war. Actively joining their side doesn’t turn it into an offensive one. The difference between offensive and defensive conflicts is the goal: In an offensive, you want to gain something. In a defence, it is about keeping what you have. Just because NATO would come to their aid, Ukraine wouldn’t want to conquer Russia.

    That being said, why wasn’t Ukraine added earlier?

    Multiple reasons probably:

    • Ukraine was and to some extent still is a post-soviet state: Oligarchs, corruption and all that comes with it.
    • There was the Budapest Memorandum in place which guaranteed a sovereign Ukrainian state affectively as buffer between Russia and other NATO countries. Which was subsequently broken by Russia in 2014.
    • “Don’t anger the Russians”. See where this got us?
    • hddsx@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Man, to drop decorum, I don’t give a shit about the Russians and angering them. I’m just trying not to give Russia a pretext to do something really fucking stupid. Yes, they can perform false flag operations for their own pretext.

      Joining an active war without a prior alliance is an escalation. To keep NATO defensive and not to bring them into an active war, there should be a different agreement signed.

      Hell, NK joining the war is an escalation by both NK and Russia. Does this justify NATO adding Ukraine just for them to immediately invoke article 5? I don’t think so.

      Regardless of ethics and politicking though, someone HAS to be done to show Russia that it can’t just arbitrarily annex parts of other countries.

      • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 month ago

        Hell, NK joining the war is an escalation by both NK and Russia. Does this justify NATO adding Ukraine just for them to immediately invoke article 5? I don’t think so.

        Here’s the thing, if Ukraine just invaded Kursk, unprompted, and Russia used North Korean troops to push them back into Ukraine, it would be problematic because of the sanctions against North Korea, but it would not be an escalation, it would merely be Russia’s allies helping it to defend itself.

        The reality though, because Russia is in Ukraine, is that those troops, even if they’re only deployed to Kursk, are done so to free up more Russian troops to invade Ukraine. Which makes it a massive escalation of the invasion of Ukraine no matter what.

        NATO troops (or planes if we were to impose a no fly zone), would, however, still be purely defensive. Hell, ask Ukraine to give up Kursk for direct Nato support and they would in a second.