North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s decision to send thousands of troops to fight alongside Russia will net him up to $25 million a month – but some sources say the soldiers may be quickly getting wiped out.
Kim deployed roughly 12,000 elite North Korean soldiers to the Russia-Ukraine battlefield – known as the meat grinder for its huge number of casualties, particularly on the Russian side – last month, and sources say he’s been paid $2,000 a month per soldier.
That’s a huge amount for the hermit nation where food is scarce and many of its 26 million people are starving to death, according to a 2023 BBC report.
However, Russian generals aren’t maximizing the use of the crack so-called “Storm Corps,” North Korean experts told The Post.
Language barriers, culture clashes and decisions like apparently disguising North Korean soldiers to look like Russian fighters from Siberia may have contributed to what at least one US official said were a “significant” number of North Korean casualties so far.
Rather than deploying the North Koreans in their own contained units, the Russian commanders are reportedly mixing them in with Russian squads – with disastrous results. In one case that has lead a confused Russian unit to abandon North Koreans posted with them on the battlefield when they didn’t realize who they were.
“They’re being wasted,” Asian expert Gordon Chang, author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America,” told The Post.
“This is crazy stuff. They’re too good to be used as cannon fodder but that’s what’s happening. It’s perplexing how they are being utilized. If they were kept in their own self-contained units they could be absolutely lethal fighting the Ukrainians. But that’s not happening.”
The “Storm Corps” – or special forces – are said to be the “best-trained” and, importantly in a starving nation, the “best fed” of all the North Korean military.
However, the quality of that food remains questionable. The German tabloid Bild reported that as part of the North Korean troop deployment, Russian soldiers can be seen in various Telegram videos – which haven’t been verified – handling canned goods with the words – “Nureongi dog meat” written on them in Korean letters.
“Nureongi” are medium-sized dogs with brownish, short fur. This Spitz breed is a popular food dog in Korea. On the back it says: “Product exclusively for the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
It’s puzzling why Kim, 40, would want to sacrifice some of elite troops. The official name for the Storm Corps in North Korea is the 11th Corps of the Korean People’s Army.
“But remember, Kim doesn’t care about his people,” Sean King, an Asia specialist with Park Strategies told The Post. As a dictator, “he doesn’t have to worry about re-election. Hundreds of thousands have died in North Korean labor camps.”
Ukrainian soldiers battled North Korean troops along the Russian border Nov. 4, the first skirmish since the foreign fighters were deployed to help Moscow’s forces in Kursk in western Russia in their ongoing war, which has raged since February 2022.
The region had previously been under Russian control until Ukrainian forces, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky re-captured it earlier this year.
During the past year, North Korea sent an estimated 8 million artillery shells and dozens of modern short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for Putin’s war effort.
“It’s still unclear how the troops will be used, but they will probably be used for combat more than anything else,” according to Bruce Klingner, a former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency veteran now with the Heritage Foundation.
“Given that Russia is using a World War I ‘meat grinder’ approach to trench warfare and there is not much of an integrated command structure it’s not going to be easy for them,” added Klinger, who has studied North and South Korea for 31 years.
“There have already been messages intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence about the Russians not knowing what to do with them. There’s also some question about how good their training is. They may be special forces but it’s a mistake to think of them in the same league as the Navy Seals, for example.”
The North Korean soldiers, who are mainly in their late teens and early 20s, have never been out of the uber-controlled Hermit Kingdom, where most citizens are not allowed Internet access and are deprived of many basic freedoms taken for granted elsewhere.
But few North Korea scholars believe a recent post by Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman who wrote on X: “A usually reliable source tells me that the North Korean soldiers who have deployed to Russia have never had unfettered access to the internet before. As a result, they are gorging on pornography.”
Bruce E. Bechtol Jr., a professor of political science at Angelo State University in Texas who’s written numerous books on North Korea, said he doubts the troops would even have smartphones or computers in their possession.
“In North Korea you need a signed letter from Kim Jong Un to use the Internet and even then it’s tightly controlled,” Bechtol told The Post. “And remember that out of those 12,000 troops sent to Russia, 500 military officers and three generals went with them. They have a lot of supervision.
“It’s not like they’re a bunch of Marines deploying to the Philippines and going out to clubs to meet girls every night.”
Greg Scarlatoiu, president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said he thinks the porn story is a “psyops run by the Ukrainian side.”
But if they are checking out porn – even if it’s an old-school dirty magazine being tossed around – or considering defecting, the North Korean soldiers are playing a very risky game, experts said.
North Korea’s notorious “three generations of punishment” rule calls for an entire three generations of a person’s family to be punished for their sins by sending them to a gulag prison camp is still very much in play in North Korea.
Additionally, Kim Jong Un has reportedly “isolated” the soldiers’ families in case there are heavy casualties and the families blab to their villages.
Most concerning, said Chang, is that by Russia bringing North Korea into the volatile Russia-Ukraine war, they are escalating the conflict beyond Ukraine and Russian territory.
“It’s not inconceivable that Ukraine could hit North Korea in retaliation,” Chang said.
Bechtol said that contrary to popular belief, North Korea has involved its military on a number of occasions over the years in Africa, the Middle East and Vietnam – but have never deployed ground troops on this scale before.
North Korea’s military advisors helped train a wing of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe’s fearsome Fifth Brigade in the early 1980. That led to the Fifth Brigade massacring 20,000 people in Matebeland in 1983.
North Korean pilots flew in combat with North Vietnam against the US in the 1960s and have lent military support to Egypt and Syria against Israel.
North Korean leaders in capital Pyongyang also sent specialists and possibly a few ground troops to Syria to fight on behalf of Bashar Al-Assad’s government in 2016-2017 during their civil war and helped train Ethiopian fighters in their ongoing wars with Eritrea in the 1980s.
Western nations have criticized the North Korean deployment as a sinister escalation of the conflict.
“The first battles with North Korean soldiers mark a new chapter of global instability,” Zelensky said. “Together with the world, we must do everything to ensure that this Russian step toward expanding the war — this true escalation — becomes a loss.”
Scarlatoiu said he thinks the war will get so bloody for the North Koreans that they won’t even want to defect to the ‘evil’ and unknown West and they will just want to get home.
Even though they’ve been described as callow and inexperienced, the North Korean soldiers are well-trained and disciplined, he said. “They are going to experience so much blood sweat and tears I think they’ll be longing for their hometowns in North Korea, however tough those towns may be.”
