North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to train in Russia and likely fight Ukraine in weeks, Washington said, as Seoul warned Tuesday that the accelerating deployment posed a “significant security threat.”
Seoul has long accused the nuclear-armed North of sending weapons to help Moscow fight Kyiv, and after Kim Jong Un signed a mutual defence deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, Pyongyang is alleged to have moved to deploy soldiers en masse.
North Korea has denied sending troops, but in the first comment in state media last week, its vice foreign minister said that were such a deployment to happen, it would be in line with international law.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned North Korea could “soon” have as many as 12,000 soldiers on Russian soil, while US President Joe Biden slammed the deployment as “very dangerous.”
