Al Jazeera :
North Korean troops are said to have clashed with Ukrainian forces in the Russian region of Kursk for the first time on Tuesday, the same day American voters re-elected Donald Trump for president, an isolationist who has argued against sending further military aid to Ukraine.
“The first battles with North Korean soldiers open a new page of instability in the world,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his evening address. “We must do everything to make this Russian step to expand the war – to really escalate it – to make this step a failure.”
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said the clashes were “small scale” and that the North Korean troops were not fighting as separate formations but were embedded in Russian units disguised as Buryats from the Russian Federation.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR) had said Russia transferred more than 7,000 North Korean military personnel “to areas near Ukraine” in the last week of October – a much higher figure than the 3,000 North Korean soldiers South Korean and United States intelligence had said were in Russia’s Kursk region on October 30.
GUR said Russia had transported the troops on 28 Russian aircraft and armed them with Russian mortars, assault rifles and machineguns.
Russia had committed 45,000 personnel to ejecting Ukrainian forces from Kursk and was trying to increase their numbers, Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said on social media.
“There are not enough Russian troops in this direction, so they are trying to attract military from North Korea there,” he wrote.
Russian forces had suffered high casualty rates in Kursk of almost 21,000 soldiers, including just under 8,000 killed, Syrskii said.
Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have acknowledged the reports of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russians.
John Kirby, Washington’s national security spokesman, has said that if North Korean troops do engage in combat, they’re “fair game” for Ukrainian forces. US President Joe Biden told reporters Ukraine could shoot North Koreans if they entered Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine launched a counter-invasion of Russian territory three months ago as an active defence because it had received intelligence that Moscow’s forces were about to invade the adjacent Sumy region.