“Soldiers are pretty much brainwashed that they have to die,” says Lee, 40, who now lives in the US. “The education we had was that committing suicide or fighting until the death was an honour and a valuable contribution to the nation and the leader.
“Being taken a prisoner of war is treated as a kind of treason and a disgrace.”
What’s in it for North Korea?
Kim’s troops have been lambs to the slaughter in Kursk, according to Kyiv, which has estimated as many as 3000 North Koreans have been killed or wounded. This doesn’t appear to have deterred Kim who, South Korea’s military intelligence says, is preparing to dispatch more troops.
What, then, is Kim’s motivation? Why did he decide to break with decades of North Korean isolation and enter a hot conflict more than 2½ years after it started?
Until this point, North Korea had been content to aid Russia’s war efforts by supplying it with billions of dollars’ worth of ammunition, missiles and artillery shells in exchange for food, oil and money, helping it circumvent crippling Western sanctions.
Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor the Kim regime have directly confirmed the deployment of North Korean troops, making any quid pro quo arrangement the subject of speculation and intelligence gathering.
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, North Korea, last year.Credit: AP
There is a consensus view among analysts that Kim’s primary goal is to upgrade his regime’s war machine and gain leverage on the international stage.
The US believes North Korea is benefiting from receiving Russian military equipment, including its advanced space and satellite technology. This would make it “more capable of waging war against its neighbours”, US deputy ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the UN Security Council in January.
“In turn, the DPRK will likely be eager to leverage these improvements to promote weapons sales and military training contracts globally,” she said, referring to North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
South Korea, meanwhile, advised the Pentagon last year that Kim would be likely to seek Russian technology on tactical nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un meet in the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea in 2019. Credit: Getty Images
Despite the heavy losses, North Korean troops are also gaining much-needed modern combat experience, the first large-scale exposure the country’s armed forces have had since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
“They’re decades behind even the Russians, and they’re on a very fast learning curve, and a lot of them are dying for that learning,” says Mick Ryan, a retired Australian Army major general who has written a book on the strategies being deployed in the Ukraine war.
“What we’ll see is that North Koreans will learn about the modern kill chain, which means you close the time between when you see a target and when you engage that target. They are still working in 1950s and 1960s times.”
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This battlefield experience, particularly in using artillery and long-range rockets, will be alarming for South Korea, which lives with an ever-present threat from its neighbour’s huge artillery force, much of it capable of hitting Seoul.
While there have been plenty of reports about North Korean soldiers’ dismal preparedness for modern warfare such as drone strikes, more recently Ukrainian military officials have acknowledged their combat skills are improving, and they are a disciplined fighting force.
“Every shelter, every car they just destroy with anti-tank grenade launchers. They move very fast, [they] literally run,” one Ukrainian commander told CNN.
They wear Russian uniforms and fake Russian IDs have been found on the bodies of slain soldiers. Russia is believed to be paying Pyongyang $US2000 ($3200) per soldier each month, according to South Korean intelligence. At that rate, 12,000 soldiers would earn about $460 million over 12 months.
It’s money that will go straight into Kim’s coffers, Lee says, and not trickle down to the soldiers.
“They will not receive a penny of it. They will receive normal North Korean payroll,” which was about $US1 a month, he said.
What does it mean for geopolitics?
North Korea’s involvement in the Ukraine war has not only upgraded its relationship with Russia to a “blood-forged alliance”, it has also made it a bigger player on the world stage, says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre’s Korea Program, a US think tank.
This changes the calculus for US President Donald Trump, who has already expressed a desire to rekindle the talks with the North Korean dictator that generated enormous fanfare six years ago but ultimately failed to halt Kim’s nuclear ambitions.
“Deepened relations with Russia mean more opportunities, either real or perceived, for North Korea, making it much more difficult for the United States to offer a deal to North Korea that is tempting enough to entice it back to the nuclear negotiating table,” Lee says.
The alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang was formalised in June 2024, when Putin and Kim signed an agreement pledging military assistance using “all means” if either were attacked. This makes it likely that North Korea will also have to factor in any deal Trump tries to broker with Putin to bring an end to the war.
There are implications for China, too. Beijing has been a critical source of aid for the North Korean regime, regarding its survival and stability on the Korean peninsula as being in its core security interests. But the relationship has been strained by Pyongyang’s pivot to Moscow.
“It’s also helping to embolden Kim,” Sydney Seiler, a former US national intelligence officer for North Korea, told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies podcast this week.
“If Russia gives it technologies to improve its WMD [weapons of mass destruction] program and conventional [weapons] program, Kim Jong-un’s options to engage in military actions targeting South Korea, even short of an all out war for unification, increase and this destabilises the peninsula.”
It’s a complex geopolitical matrix hanging over the heads of young North Korean men who, until several months ago, had spent their lives cut off from the outside world – many of them now destined to meet a grim end on foreign soil fighting a war that’s not theirs.
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