We should probably have known. When Putin submitted a bill on ratification of a comprehensive partnership agreement with North Korea to the Duma on October 14, he knew what would come next even if others were less certain. The Russian despot had decided to once again about to raise the stakes and would know that once again the West would be upset.
And so it is that — according to South Korean intelligence — as many as 1,500 North Korean special forces troops are on their way to Europe to help crush one of its youngest democracies. Another 10,500 men will follow, South Korean media reported, again citing the NIS intelligence service. Ukrainian intelligence says North Koreans are already on the battlefield and that some have been killed.
Whether the West actually takes action as a result of this, and the earlier dispatch of Iranian ballistic missiles and growing Chinese military involvement (which taken together represent an unprecedented rise in outside involvement) is another matter. President Biden arrived in Europe on October 18, with Ukraine’s defense reportedly at the top of his agenda. UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer said that, if true, the reports indicated Russian desperation. We will see.
The Russian-North Korean alliance document, signed in Pyongyang in June, allowed for mutual military aid in case of aggression. In the warped world of Putin and his North Korean ally Kim Jong Un, aggression can be defined as Ukraine defending its internationally recognized territory from the Russian invaders.
This is far from the first aid that North Korea has sent, although it’s the most significant, Previously, the crypto-narco Pyongyang regime dispatched three million artillery shells to Putin’s army. Then ballistic missiles. Now soldiers.
Does Putin have no shame? The answer is that he has none at all.
His colonial quest has now become the 71-year-old’s all-consuming obsession. This is not just about survival — Russian leaders don’t last long when they lose wars — but also about his legacy. If the war on Ukraine fails, what is Putin’s place in the history books? Perhaps something like Tsar Nicholas II, who lost wars in 1905 and 1917, and was ultimately shot in a filthy basement.
Putin continues the long and ignoble Soviet tradition of dealing with the devil, an approach that puts regime survival above all else. He may loudly proclaim Stalin’s bloody wartime successes, but as with Ukraine, his understanding of history is partial and flawed.
In 1955, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov met Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The dispute between the two became so heated that Molotov sought to close the argument by posing what he imagined to be an unanswerable question to the Germans — how did the Germans allow Hitler to take power? Adenauer calmly parried: “Unlike you, Mr. Molotov, I did not shake hands with Hitler, nor did I make any treaties with him.”
It was personal and damning. Molotov’s name is etched onto one of the 20th century’s most shameful agreements, worse even than the 1938 Munich agreement.
The deal made the Soviet Union an ally of Hitler’s Germany, and thus also associated with its crimes. This shame could not be washed away either by the subsequent military conflict between these countries or by almost a century of time that has passed after those events.
The current Russia-Northern Korea strategic agreement is another exchange of short-term relief for a long-term reputational stain.
In some ways, the two countries are well-matched. The DPRK was the first “people’s democratic republic”, a puppet regime established by the Soviet Union after World War II. Putin used exactly the same language when he created the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s democratic republics” on Ukrainian sovereign territory. Neither country cares for its people and their deaths — through war, disease or famine — are a matter of absolute indifference to their rulers, who are protected from accountability or even criticism by phalanxes of secret policemen and other regime thugs.
But the truth is the truth. The botched response of the Russian state saw more than 800,000 die from coronavirus, while almost a million fled to avoid despotism and conscription, and more than 600,000 have been killed and wounded in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. All this for a country suffering an acute demographic crisis. The war “has turned a crisis into a catastrophe,” as one report put it.
Seeking to rescue his vainglorious project by calling up the legions of one of the world’s worst countries may be audacious, but will it produce better results than Stalin’s deal with Hitler?
It might be argued that it’s instead a symbol of Russia’s reduced status when the Kremlin boss has to go cap in hand to a nuclear-armed country best known for wild rhetoric and famine.
Russia now recognizes this country as its strategic partner. And condemns the UN Security Council sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear program that it helped enact in the 1990s. Are we really in a position where Russia would offer nuclear protection and even assistance to a rogue state in breach of its international obligations?
Putin was the first Moscow leader to visit Pyongyang, a price he had to pay to get the aid he wanted.
His mission has emphasized Russia’s geopolitical degradation and its newfound status as an international outcast along with Northern Korea and Iran. The inevitable question arises — just how far is Putin prepared to go?
This is where Russia has arrived. In a political and moral swamp with the world’s most despised. Perhaps one day, Russia will magically return to normality and behave again like a grown-up member of the world community. Perhaps, but for now, it is no better than a wicked mixture of Stalin’s cruelty and Brezhnev’s infirmity.
Oleksandr Moskalenko is an academic researcher focusing on European politics. He was an in-residence fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) He has a Ph.D. in European Law and previously lived in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
