Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that Russia will be reinforced with troops from North Korea, which he said has also supplied Moscow with additional ballistic missiles.
Vladimir Putin’s regime “is preparing to send an additional contingent of North Koreans to its territory. They have received, believe it or not, additional ballistic missiles from North Korea,” Zelensky stated in his daily address.
“This is the first time that they [Russian forces] cannot wage war without reinforcements from North Korea,” the Ukrainian President added.
Zelensky urged Japan and South Korea, rivals of the North Korean regime, to provide Kyiv with assistance on air defense, describing it as necessary to contain Pyongyang’s growing military power, bolstered by the experience gained through supporting Moscow.
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Over the past weekend, Zelensky said a decision had been made regarding the deployment on Russian soil of between 30,000 and 50,000 North Korean soldiers.
Pyongyang has become one of Russia’s closest military partners since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un backed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, blaming the “hegemonic policy” of the United States and Western countries.
At the 2023 and 2024 Putin-Kim summits, bilateral cooperation was elevated to new levels. Kim’s week-long trip to Russia in 2023 marked his first meeting with a foreign leader since 2019.
In June 2024, Putin traveled to Pyongyang, his first visit to North Korea in nearly a quarter of a century, and signed with Kim the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, formalizing a military alliance between two nuclear states. The treaty includes provisions for mutual military assistance, directly violating UN Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang.
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In the two years following the pact, North Korean troops have fought alongside Russian forces in the war against Ukraine, and missiles and artillery ammunition manufactured by Pyongyang have reached the battlefield to fuel the Russian war machine.
At the start of 2026, South Korean intelligence services estimated that around 6,000 North Korean soldiers, more than a third of those deployed on Russian territory, had been killed or wounded in the fighting.
Russia began using North Korean KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles against Ukraine at the end of 2023, and has since helped improve the system’s survivability and accuracy. Under the June 2024 treaty, more than 30,000 North Korean workers are currently deployed in Russia.
In exchange for the military and civilian support provided, a Russian veto in 2024 at the Security Council, with China abstaining, effectively ended the main multilateral mechanism for enforcing sanctions against North Korea, the UN panel of experts.
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With support from European partners, Ukraine has managed to strike areas of Russian territory thousands of kilometers from the front line, and Kyiv’s technological sophistication in the field of drones has increased significantly over the past year. Last June, Zelensky announced a 40-day campaign to intensify drone attacks on Russian territory.
