What repercussions could Kim Jong Un’s troop deployment have in Asia? Professor Andrew Yeo comments to : “We are witnessing the drawing of new geopolitical lines. kyiv could send messages to North Korean soldiers to encourage defections, but support for Ukraine in South Korea is a divisive issue. While China remains equidistant and does not want to be identify with the Russia-North Korea bloc”.
Milan () – The deployment of some 10,000 North Korean soldiers in Russia is accompanied by an increase in tensions on the Korean peninsula. The escalation in Asian theater has taken a backseat, but in reality it has already been underway for several years, as maintained Andrew Yeoresearcher at the Brooking Institute and professor of Politics at Catholic American University.
“When the news broke that North Korean soldiers were being sent to eastern Russia and assigned to the front in the Kursk region [donde el ejército ucraniano lanzó una ofensiva en agosto]several things were already happening between North Korea and South Korea,” the expert tells . “Pyongyang blew up the roads connecting to the South. They were not used, but had been built in the hope of greater cooperation.” Not only that, Yeo continues: “The North Koreans are also using what are called ‘gray zone’ tactics, such as launching balloons filled with garbage. These actions are not dangerous enough to provoke a counterattack by South Korea, but they still cause concern in Seoul. And then there is the launching of missiles, which has become a common practice,” explains the professor.
To what extent are these actions related to the presence of soldiers in Russia? “I think they are separate issues, but at the same time, on a broader political level, North Korea has taken a new direction in its relations with South Korea. Until 4-5 years ago it participated in high-level summits with Seoul and Washington. Now it no longer intends to negotiate with the United States and is turning towards Russia and Iran, while China provides it with economic support.”
The reasons for this change of course, according to Professor Andrew Yeo, are diverse, and arose during the Covid-19 pandemic: “In those years Kim Jong Un adopted a different attitude, after the failure of negotiations with the United States.” It refers to the Hanoi summit, which took place in 2019 in Vietnam between the then president (re-elected yesterday) Donald Trump and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The summit ended without an agreement due to differences between both: Pyongyang demanded that part of the sanctions be withdrawn and Washington wanted a total renunciation of the nuclear program. Proposals that both parties considered inadmissible.
After this failure, North Korea began to look inward again. “There have been changes in domestic laws, such as harsher penalties and fines for those found in possession of information from abroad. It would give the impression that Kim Jong Un is trying to reassert his authority. And then he began to paint the government South Korean as increasingly hostile, to the point that, at the end of 2023, it came to consider South Korea as a foreign state and enemy number one, abandoning ideas of reunification. This is the change that has occurred in the country. North Korea’s thought and strategy.
But in South Korea there was also a change of government when the conservative president Yoon Suk-yeol was elected in 2022, who “as soon as he took office, strengthened the alliance with the United States and chose Kim Yung-ho, a Unification Minister, as Minister of Unification. university professor who advocates the unification of the peninsula by absorption, after a collapse of the regime. And the information sent to the North from the South has also increased. However – Yeo points out – North Korea had stopped talking to Korea. South and the United States even before the change of government. The previous Moon administration was progressive and strongly wanted engagement with North Korea.” In 2020, for example, Pyongyang had already blown up the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong in response to the sending of propaganda leaflets “and had increased aggressive rhetoric,” comments the researcher.
Finally, the geopolitical context of the region has also changed: “Kim Jong Un’s regime considers that the conflict in Ukraine is as real as that in the Taiwan Strait. We are witnessing the redesign of geopolitical lines. The strengthening of ties between the United States, the West, NATO and the Indo-Pacific countries make North Korea see its environment as more prone to confrontation And indeed at the internal level it speaks of a ‘new cold war’ in which it is more. useful to ally with Russia”.
The fact that the North Korean soldiers are not in the rear but on the front line asks if we are not witnessing the general rehearsal of a conflict that will later be replicated in the Pacific. According to Andrew Yeo, the answer is “no”: “The North Korean regime is very opportunistic, so I think their main objective is to receive economic aid, food and fuel. In the long term, there are other benefits that North Korea could receive, such as test weapons and have their soldiers fight, who have not participated in a conflict since the Korean War of 1953. But I think that this is a secondary motivation compared to immediate gains and benefits. However, it is understandable that it is a concern for the West. , which fears that ties between North Korea and Russia have other implications, such as improved missile technology,” he continues.
It is unclear whether the Pyongyang regime will send more troops and much will depend on results on the ground. “I think Kim will want to see how this group performs before he decides to send others.” These are soldiers who have probably received a certain type of indoctrination by the regime and it is at this point where the Ukrainians could exploit psychological warfare tactics: “I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Yeo, “if the Ukrainians used loudspeakers and spoke in Korean to “Tell the North Koreans that they are being used as pawns in this conflict and try to push them to defect. Recent meetings in Brussels with South Korean diplomatic representatives have been extremely useful to NATO officials.”
But at the same time greater South Korean support for Ukraine risks causing divisions domestically. “There’s bound to be a debate. Opposition politicians are protesting Yoon’s language on supporting Ukraine and saying it’s necessary to stay out of the war in Europe. But of course conservatives and Yoon supporters “they pose the issue as a clash between democracies and autocracies.”
Therefore, the coming weeks of conflict will be crucial to understanding how North Korea’s (and possibly South Korea’s) engagement in Russia will evolve. Meanwhile, in the East, China is also closely watching events in Ukraine: “The Chinese have been, at least in public, quite silent,” comments the expert. “So far they have always claimed that North Korea lives under threat from the United States and has the right to protect itself as it wishes. But in reality I think there are some concerns. The United States believes that China has much more influence over North Korea than it does. In fact, Beijing has signed sanctions against Pyongyang in the past, and does not want to be associated with the bloc of Russia and North Korea. It prefers to distance itself because it fears that the destabilizing relations between Russia and North Korea will deteriorate. turn against China, strengthening the trilateral alliance between the United States, Japan and South Korea.”
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