Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that defence relationships with his country’s partners would have to change in light of North Korean transfers of people as well as weapons to Russian forces in Ukraine.
The Kremlin dismissed South Korean assertions that North Korea may have sent some military personnel to help Russia against Ukraine and might be weighing a bigger deployment.
“We see that the alliance between Russia and such regimes as the North Korean one is getting stronger,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “This is not just about the transfer of weapons, this is in fact about the transfer of people from North Korea to the armed forces of the occupiers.
“It is obvious that under such conditions our relationship with our partners needs to evolve,” he added. “The front line needs more support. We are talking about more long-range capabilities for Ukraine and more sustained supplies for our forces rather than a simple list of military hardware.”
South Korea’s Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun said on Tuesday that “there was a high possibility” North Korea could deploy troops to help Russia in the war with Ukraine.
Kim also told a parliamentary hearing that news reports of North Korean military officers having been killed in a Ukrainian strike on territory controlled by Russian forces were likely true.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked on Thursday if North Korea was sending its troops to fight in Ukraine, told reporters: “This looks like another bit of fake news.”
Meanwhile, Russian glide bombs have struck a concentration of Ukrainian troops near the border of Russia’s western Kursk region, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday.
It said the attack was directed against “a strongpoint and concentration of Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel”, and the bombs were delivered by a Russian Su-34 warplane.
Ukraine caught Moscow by surprise on August 6 by bursting across the border into the Kursk region, in the first invasion of Russian sovereign territory since World War Two.
Russia has been trying for more than two months to eject the Ukrainian forces. Earlier on Sunday, the defence ministry in Moscow said it was pursuing offensive operations at several dozen locations in the region.
Team Bharatshakti
(With inputs from Reuters)