January 10, 2026: In Ukraine Russia expected a quick victory and did not have sufficient munitions for a World War Two-length war. Unlike Ukraine, which had substantial military and economic support from NATO nations, all Russia had were Iran and North Korea. These two nations had long been under economic sanctions for misbehavior. This made them ideal allies for wartime Russia. Iran provided missiles and drones while North Korea supplied artillery and lots of 152mm and 122mm shells to feed the guns. The North Koreans took advantage of Russian desperation and sold them older munitions. Some of those shells were past their use-by date and unreliable. The Russians were desperate and didn’t bother to check for this. That was a costly mistake because their artillerymen found that many of the shells did not work and some exploded when fired. This destroyed the gun and sometimes killed or injured some of the artillerymen.

North Korea also loaned the Russians two or three brigades of its own units. There were some Russian and North Korean bilingual officers and troops attached to the staffs of these brigades. That helped the brigade commanders to understand what the Russians wanted done, but there were problems getting that information to the North Korean soldiers in a timely and useful manner.

One thing the Russians did notice was that the North Koreans were far more professional than Russians. Their attack tactics were more disciplined, and, unlike the Russians, the North Koreans took their dead and wounded off the battlefield. Russians also discovered that North Korean battlefield medical care was superior to what Russia offered. North Korea had also agreed to treat seriously wounded Russian soldiers in North Korean hospitals. The Russian patients noted that the care was far superior to what they would encounter in a Russian hospital.

At the end of 2024 about 12,000 North Korean soldiers arrived in Russia and, after a short amount of additional training, were sent to fight along Russian troops in Ukraine. The North Koreans were first seen in combat during December. The Ukrainian forces facing them estimate that the North Koreans have suffered about 30 percent casualties so far because the Russians were using their Korean troops for frontal assaults. There were few Russian soldiers available for such costly attacks. Most remaining Russian troops were on the defensive. Ukraine had developed attack tactics that relied on self-propelled machine-guns and other close combat weapons as well as robotic vehicles to clear minefields. Russia urgently needed more soldiers and ammunition.

Russia agreed to treat any wounded North Koreans but, when hundreds of wounded North Korean soldiers were taken to Russian military hospitals, it was discovered there were few, if any interpreters who could translate for the medical personnel to treat wounds. This complicated treatment and led to many avoidable deaths. There were few translators in combat, which led to at least two incidents of North Korean and Russian troops firing on each other. To the North Koreans, the Russians and Ukrainians looked similar, spoke similar languages and wore similar combat uniforms. The lack of interpreters led to the North Korean troops becoming a liability to the Russians as well.

The Ukrainians captured two of the North Korean soldiers. This was not easy because the North Koreans had been ordered by their leaders back home to kill themselves rather than be captured. Many did so, to spare their families retribution from the North Korean government.

The Ukrainians told their North Korean prisoners that they would not be identified. This would keep their families safe. In return, the North Korean prisoners would submit to questioning about the North Korean military and life in North Korea. The two soldiers revealed that they were trained more thoroughly and intensively than the Russian soldiers they worked with in Ukraine.

The two prisoners knew little about the war before being sent to fight in it. They then discovered a new world outside the very confined and restricted lives they led in North Korea. There, young men are conscripted into the army at 18 and serve up to ten years. During that time most have little or no contact with their families. Home visits are allowed only when a parent dies.

Many North Korean soldiers in Ukraine were able to obtain cell phones, most likely by trading some of their equipment for cell phones with corrupt Russian supply sergeants, and enough understanding of Russian to use the phones. This was a shocking and revealing experience. The phones enabled them to find out about a world they didn’t know existed. They were shocked to find out how different life was in prosperous and democratic South Korea, although many North Koreans already knew this. Saying that out loud in North Korea was a criminal offense that often resulted in a long and often fatal time in a labor camp. It is likely that any of these North Korean troops who return to North Korea will be put in prison camps for the rest of their lives.

North Korea has worked with Russia in the past but never to the extent that North Korean soldiers were sent to fight for Russia in Ukraine. That was because Russia finally agreed to upgrade North Korean strategic missiles. In June 2024, Russian and North Korea signed a Strategic Partnership treaty that obliged each nation to assist the other in wartime. In peacetime the two nations will supply mutual aid in military matters. North Korea wants assistance in perfecting and upgrading their nuclear weapons and launch platforms, including a modern SSBN/nuclear submarine carrying ready to launch missiles with nuclear warheads. Russia has such submarines but North Korea does not, and has been trying to develop them on its own but those keep sinking.

The need for the North Korean treaty is because Russian troops in Ukraine have suffered such high losses since early 2022 that the Russian army has run out of soldiers. Russia has lost over a million killed, disabled or missing while fighting in Ukraine. Many of the wounded suffered further when they found that the Russian medical system was unable to adequately treat them. This led to many thousands of desertions and millions of military age men leaving the country.

The North Korean army, or Choson inmin gun, has benefited greatly from its participation in the Ukraine War. As a longtime ally of Russia, North Korea responded to calls from Russia to supply weapons, munitions and eventually troops for the Ukraine operation. North Korea currently has one of the world’s largest armies with around 1.3 million active-duty soldiers, who spend most of their service time as slave labor for senior military officers. North Korea has not been directly involved in any major wars for over 70 years. Lack of battlefield experience is a source of considerable concern for North Korea anxious to counter South Korea’s more technologically advanced military. Now North Korean soldiers are learning the realities of modern drone warfare first-hand. That included learning how to shoot down drones. These North Korean soldiers were young, motivated, disciplined, physically fit, brave, and good at using small arms. Russia pays North Korea $2000 per soldier each month.

For North Korea the real prize was access to advanced Russian military technology. North Korea received support in increasing its anti-aircraft, submarine, and missile capabilities. Ukraine was a valuable testing ground for North Korea to assess the effectiveness of the weapons it supplied to Russia. Now North Korea can improve the quality of its own domestic arms industry and adapt future output to the realities of the modern battlefield. Troops who survive their time on the Ukrainian front lines are nominally expected to return home and become instructors, sharing their knowledge of modern warfare with colleagues. More likely they will immediately be sent to prison camps for many years. At this point, North Korea’s participation in the Ukraine War looks to be less about supporting Russia's imperial ambitions and more about graft for North Korean senior officers and politicians.

In the short term, the presence of North Korean soldiers allowed Russia to overcome growing manpower shortages. At the time Russia was losing tens of thousands of troops each month. For the first time in decades, the North Korean army might be gaining real military experience which might conceivably make it more capable of waging war against South Korea or Japan.

North Korea continues to be a threat over 70 years since the Korean War ended in 1953. An armistice was signed and prisoners of war were exchanged, but troops remained lined up along a four kilometers wide DMZ/DeMilitarized Zone that stretched from coast to coast. There was a ceasefire agreement, not an end to the war. All attempts at negotiating an end to the war in the last half century have failed. The three years of fighting caused 325,000 American casualties, including 33,651 dead. South Korean troops suffered 415,000 killed, while other nations fighting North Korea suffered 15,000 casualties. The communist forces suffered 1.5 million killed, most of them Chinese because North Korea would have lost without massive reinforcements from China. There were several million civilian dead.

After the war, North Korea experienced a period of economic growth as its industrial facilities were rebuilt with Russian aid. From 1904 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony, and the north had mines, railroads and factories built by the Japanese. The south, which always had more farmland, was turned into a largely agricultural area to help feed Japan. During the Korean War, industrial and transportation facilities were heavily damaged, and reconstruction was slower in the south.

In the 1970s, foreign investment in the south began to grow, and local entrepreneurs began to start, or expand their businesses. By the 1980s, North Korea's centrally planned economy was falling apart because so much money was diverted to military spending, and lack of marketing resulted in products that could only be sold to other communist nations. When the Soviet empire fell apart in 1991, the markets for most North Korean goods disappeared. Corruption and lack of investment in agriculture resulted in food shortages, as well as the collapse of most industrial enterprises, except those that made weapons. Food aid from the Soviet Union ceased and that led to widespread hunger in North Korea during the 1990s when several million civilians starved to death.

Post-1991 documents from the Russian archives showed that Stalin appointed Kim Il Sung as ruler of North Korea and in 1950 ordered him to invade South Korea and unite Korea. When that did not work, Russia ordered China to rescue the North Koreans. China complied and told Russia that the Chinese debt was paid to Russia for assistance in the 1949 Chinese Communist Party victory during the 22 year long civil war.

In 2010, an article appeared in a Chinese magazine describing the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. What was unusual about the article, in a government approved publication, was the frank admission that North Korea had started it all, by invading South Korea. But once news of the article spread, and was posted on Internet sites, the Chinese government ordered the article withdrawn and denounced it as untrue. The unofficial reason was that China wished to avoid angering North Korea. This, despite the fact that Chinese participation in the war killed or wounded over a million Chinese soldiers. Even Chinese leader Mao Zedong lost a son in Korea.

Since 1950, it had been the official Chinese position that the war started with a South Korean invasion of the north, to which the north responded by moving into South Korea. For decades, all communist nations accepted this version, even though all evidence pointed towards the north invading first. Then, in the 1990s, the Russian government released telegrams sent before 1960, by Russian and North Korean leaders, making it clear that Russia wanted the invasion, and that North Korea duly carried it out.

Chinese troops entered North Korea in late 1950, to prevent American forces from occupying all of Korea, and that resulted in a two year stalemate along the current inter-Korean border which is now the DMZ Demilitarized Zone. To justify the Chinese losses, and maintain good relations with North Korea, China continued to insist that South Korea had started the war, even after everyone agreed that Russian leader Josef Stalin and North Korea had been the instigators.

What this incident really tells North Korea is that China has admitted the truth about who started the war by authorizing the article's publication in the first place but is so sorry for this accident and officially sticks by the earlier lie.

The Korean War lies and deceptions linger longer because China and North Korea want it that way.