North Korea to deploy 30K troops to Russia, says Ukrainian President Zelenskyy

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea is preparing to deploy 30,000 fresh troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while claiming that Moscow is also preparing to mobilize Russians to boost its flagging campaign.

Russia needs combat troops, and North Korea, with the fourth-largest army in the world, has over a million. The economically challenged regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has meanwhile been selling so many arms to Russia that the value of the exports over three years likely exceeds its annual gross domestic product.

“Russia wants to receive another 30,000 troops from North Korea,” the Ukrainian leader wrote on X on Sunday. “Since June, preparations have been underway in Russia’s Voronezh region to receive them. “

Voronezh, a transport hub southeast of Moscow, lies approximately 95 miles from the Ukrainian border.

It offers transport links to Kursk — where North Korean troops fought from November 2024 to March 2025 — as well as to Belgorod, a front-line Russian city, and Rostov, a key staging area for Russian operations in Ukraine’s south and southeast.

Russian President Vladimir Putin desperately needs a battlefield breakthrough after months of increasingly sophisticated and damaging Ukrainian drone attacks on infrastructure deep inside Russia.

At the front, indications are that “kontraktniki” — Russia’s contracted, volunteer soldiers — are being attrited at a faster rate than they can be recruited.

On Friday, Mr. Zelenskyy said Kyiv has learned that Moscow is preparing a new round of mobilizations to replace soldiers lost. On Saturday, the Ukrainian president said Moscow enlisted 221,000 soldiers this year and has sustained nearly 225,500 losses.

A recent visitor to the Russian Far East told this newspaper that recruiting stations are open around the clock in a bid, apparently, to lure late-night candidates for the armed services — especially those who might be under the influence of alcohol.

The Kremlin, apparently taken aback by Ukraine’s forceful resistance to its February 2022 invasion, mobilized 300,000 reservists in September 2024.

However — perhaps concerned about fueling the kind of grassroots pushback that undercut the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 Afghanistan campaign — Moscow has not deployed conscripts against Ukraine.

On Monday, Chairman of the Duma Defense Council Andrey Kartapolov dismissed talk of another mobilization as “rumors,” according to Russia’s Tass News Agency.

Kim’s expendables

In tightly controlled North Korea, there is no likelihood of pushback. Particularly so as Mr. Kim has personally honored veterans and families of the fallen with emotive meetings and a new war memorial.

Mr. Zelenskyy said North Korea is also preparing to transport additional ballistic missile launchers to Russia.

While Iran has supplied drones to Russia, North Korea has been Russia’s biggest overseas supplier of artillery and missile munitions.

Ukrainian media report that thanks to real-war experience and Russia’s likely technical aid, North Korea’s tactical ballistic missiles have greatly improved their accuracy from earlier in the war.

“This is a threat not only to Ukraine,” Mr. Zelenskyy continued. “Russia is helping North Korea learn how to wage war, improve its weapons, and gain real combat experience in using them.”

Pyongyang’s troops had not fought a major war since the Korean War ended in 1953, but have gained up-to-the-minute experience thanks to the deployment of up to 15,000 combat troops from elite North Korean units who in 2024 helped the Russians repel a Ukrainian incursion in Kursk.

A 2024 treaty signed in Pyongyang by Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim called for mutual defense if sovereign territory — such as Kursk — was attacked.

It is unknown if recent contacts between officials from troop-rich Pyongyang and manpower-poor Moscow altered those terms.

Though 30,000 bayonets would be a massive deployment for most capitals, for Pyongyang and its 1.2 million-strong military, it’s minimalist. An estimated 200,000 of those soldiers are considered crack troops.

Those units showcased high-casualty tolerance in the 2024 action amid massive — albeit unconfirmed — losses, but gained respect from Ukrainian troops for their speed, physical fitness, and marksmanship.

Their refusal to be taken alive also won alarmed notice. Only two POWs were captured in Kursk; others, incapacitated, killed themselves with “self blasting.”

Having adapted to a drone-centric battleground, North Korea’s army possesses not just greater numbers, but also superior experience than their South Korean counterparts.

Seoul’s forces have not engaged in large-scale operations since withdrawing from Vietnam in 1973.

Following Kursk’s recapture, North Korean troops are not believed to have reengaged in ground combat. However, Ukrainian reports from early this year stated that North Korean artillery units were firing across the Russian border, while engineers were conducting demining and ordnance clearances.

War bonanza

Sales to Mr. Putin’s war machine are a windfall for Mr. Kim that is far more valuable than is widely known says Bruce Bechtol, who teaches political science at Angelo State University, and who studies North Korean arms exports,

Citing Seoul’s Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, Mr. Bechtol said North Korea earned $20 billion from Russia between late 2023 and March 2025, based on shipping 20,000 container-loads of arms.

The exports had, by March 2026, risen to 33,000 containers, Mr. Bechtol said, calling it “a staggering number.”

The containers hold artillery pieces, shells, multiple-launch rocket systems, anti-tank missiles and small arms as well as the short-range ballistic missiles referenced by Mr. Zelenskyy.

The sums paid are massive by the standards of Pyongyang’s modest macro economy.

“North Korea’s unclassified GDP is roughly $26 billion a year,” said Mr. Bechtol.  “This proliferation to this one country, sending them weapons systems and munitions … is the basis for an incredibly important relationship.”

It’s not just cash. Moscow is supplying Pyongyang with “badly needed foodstuffs, oil, military equipment, and upgraded systems, technological support, and has even constructed new factories for the North, including drones,” Mr. Bechtol said.

It is unknown how Mr. Kim’s combat troops are remunerated by Moscow. And Mr. Zelenskyy offered no information regarding what arm incoming troops hail from, nor their mission.

“All of this is a threat to everyone in Asia who is within range of North Korean missiles,” Mr. Zelensky concluded.

Seoul’s nonresponse

That includes South Korea and Japan. Both democracies have supplied nonlethal equipment to Ukraine but no arms.

Ukrainian intelligence has consistently reported ahead of Western or South Korean agencies when it comes to details of North Korean actions alongside Russia.

“The government is closely monitoring developments related to military cooperation between North Korea and Russia,” South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, according to Yonhap News Agency, after Mr. Zelenskyy’s statement. “Military cooperation between North Korea and Russia in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions must be stopped immediately.”

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s administration has sought, since taking office in June 2025, to open negotiations with North Korea. Relations have been frozen since 2019.

Pyongyang, fortified by its alliance with Moscow and an apparently increasingly equitable relationship with Beijing, has turned a deaf ear.

Last week, Seoul dropped its prior insistence on denuclearization as its foremost priority. The new stance is “peace first” rather than “denuclearization first,” Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said.