Seoul summons ambassador to Moscow and demands withdrawal of North Korean troops from Russia

South Korea summoned Russia’s ambassador to Seoul on Monday to criticize Pyongyang’s decision to send thousands of troops to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine, the foreign ministry said, calling for their immediate withdrawal.

About 1,500 North Korean special forces troops are already acclimatizing in Russia and are likely to head to the front lines soon, Seoul’s spy agency said on Friday, with more troops due to be sent soon in what would be Pyongyang’s first such overseas deployment.

South Korea, which has long argued that nuclear-armed North Korea is supplying Russia with weapons for use in Ukraine, has expressed alarm over the deployment, which comes after Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a military deal in June.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Hong-kyun expressed Seoul’s “serious concerns about North Korea’s recent deployment of troops to Russia and urged the immediate withdrawal of North Korean troops and the cessation of related cooperation,” the ministry said in a statement.

Kim told Russia’s ambassador to South Korea, Georgy Zinoviev, that North Korea, which supplies Russia with weapons and troops for the war in Ukraine, “poses a significant threat to the security of not only South Korea, but also the international community.” He also “stressed that such actions violate numerous UN Security Council resolutions and the UN Charter.”

– N. Koreans in Ukraine? –

On Friday, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) released detailed satellite images that it said showed the first deployment of elite North Korean soldiers being transported by Russian naval vessels to Vladivostok. Seoul’s spy agency said that between October 8 and 13, “North Korea ferried its special forces to Russia on a Russian Navy transport ship, confirming the start of North Korea’s military involvement” in Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

The first contingent of troops, who South Korean media reported belonged to North Korea’s elite Special Operations Forces unit, also known as the Storm Corps, is currently stationed at military bases in the Russian Far East. According to NIS, the special forces “will be deployed to the front lines (of the Ukrainian conflict) immediately after completing acclimatization training.”

The NIS also said on Friday that since last August, the North has “supplied Russia with more than 13,000 containers of artillery shells, missiles, anti-tank missiles and other lethal weapons.” Pyongyang and Moscow have been allies since the founding of North Korea after World War II and have grown even closer since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted intelligence reports that North Korea was preparing 10,000 troops to support Russia in its fight against Kyiv and said Moscow was relying on the North to compensate for its significant losses.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian media reported that six North Korean officers were killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on Russian-occupied territory near Donetsk. South Korea’s defense minister said at the time that this was “highly likely” to be true.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated feed – AFP)