10,000 North Korean troops ready to join Putin’s war, says Zelensky

Pyongyang’s involvement would be ‘the first step to a world war’, the Ukrainian president has warned.

Volodymyr Zelensky at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. Picture: AFP

An army of 10,000 North Koreans is preparing to join Russian forces in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, warning that Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict would be the “the first step to a world war”.

Speaking in Brussels before a meeting with NATO defence ministers, Mr Zelensky said the troops consisted of “land forces (and) other tactical personnel”, adding that some North Korean officers had already arrived in occupied parts of Ukraine.

“Because of the gap in mobilisation, because of lots of Russian losses, and Putin is afraid of mobilisation very much … that is why he is trying to involve other participants in this war,” he said.

His comments follow several weeks of briefings by Ukrainian and Western intelligence sources about the arrival of North Korean fighters, including reports of six officers killed by a missile strike in the Donetsk region this month.

US and NATO officials have, however, expressed scepticism. The White House said on Tuesday it could not independently confirm the presence of North Koreans. “We’re obviously looking into those reports to see if it’s accurate,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

Separately, the former head of the Ukrainian armed forces has said the West failed to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to mount a successful counter­offensive against Russia last year because of fears Moscow could respond with a nuclear strike.

President Vladimir Putin and senior Russian officials have repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in response to Western involvement in the war. In 2022, as Russian forces faced being routed in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, the US began “preparing rigorously” for a possible Russian nuclear attack, CNN reported, citing White House officials.

Ukraine received long-range Himars and Storm Shadow missiles, modern battle tanks and powerful artillery systems from its Western allies before its counteroffensive last year. But officials in Kyiv said the deliveries often took too long to arrive and the quantities were far smaller than promised.

On Wednesday, Mr Zelensky unveiled his long-awaited victory plan during a speech in Kyiv. As well as demanding permission to use Western missiles to strike deep into Russia, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO without delay. However, US and NATO officials have signalled that an immediate invitation is unrealistic.

In Brussels on Thursday, Mr Zelensky said he had told Donald Trump last month that only membership of the Western military alliance or nuclear weapons could provide Ukraine with genuine security.

“Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons – and then that is our protection – or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said he told Mr Trump in New York. “Today, apart from NATO, we do not know of effective alliances. I believe that Donald Trump heard me. He said: ‘You have fair arguments’.”

It was unclear if Mr Zelensky meant Ukraine could start developing its own nuclear weapons. Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union but gave up its nuclear warheads in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from Britain, the US and Russia. Kyiv is not now believed to possess the uranium enrichment or plutonium production facilities that would be necessary to create a nuclear bomb.

THE TIMES