WASHINGTON – North Korean troops in Russia are ready to begin combat within days and are a legitimate military target for the Ukrainian military, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday.
Blinken told a State Department news conference that 8,000 North Korean troops are currently stationed in Kursk, a Russian region whose territory was captured by Ukrainian forces this summer. The Russian military is training them in artillery, drones and trench clearing.
Blinken said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reliance on the North Korean regime’s military is a sign of weakness. Blinken said Russian troops are suffering 1,200 casualties and deaths per day in combat, more than at any time during the war.
Blinken said the war is a “self-made meat grinder.”
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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a press conference that the Kremlin is outfitting North Korean troops with Russian military uniforms and equipment.
Mr. Austin said that given the Russian casualties, the North Korean forces would not last long.
“These 10,000 people don’t even come close to making up for what the Russians lost,” Austin said.
The Pentagon announced earlier this week that North Korea had sent 10,000 troops to train at a Russian military base in the country’s east.
South Korea earlier announced that its intelligence services had used facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence to identify some of the number of North Korean troops on Russian territory. Ukrainian intelligence also said it had received information about the presence of troops near Ukraine and that integration with the Russian military was not proceeding smoothly.
The South Korean and Japanese militaries made the announcement Thursday after North Korea conducted the longest test flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile in history. The missile could theoretically reach the U.S. mainland during its 86-minute flight before crashing off the coast of Japan.
