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.
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.