Western embarrassment over North Korean engagement

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-Hui at the Kremlin in Moscow on November 4, 2024. MIKHAIL TERESHCHENKO / SPUTNIK / AP The official condemnation of Ukraine’s allies will have put three weeks to come. Friday, November 8, the North Atlantic Council, the political decision-making body within NATO, “strongly condemned” the engagement of North Korean soldiers alongside Russia, now proven in the Russian region of Kursk, partly occupied by Ukraine since this summer. Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers War in Ukraine: Westerners confirm the deployment of North Korean soldiers in Russia Read later “The deployment of thousands of fighters [de Corée du Nord] constitutes a dangerous intensification of the already substantial support provided by this country to the war of aggression that Russia is waging, completely illegally, against Ukraine,” denounced the Atlantic Alliance. A press release signed exceptionally by its partners in Asia and Oceania, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, as well as by Ukraine. A collective condemnation which comes two days after the publication of an unusually dramatic column by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday by the Politico news site. “The presence of North Korean troops in Europe marks a turning point […] Are we on the verge of something far darker than the devastation that has already been inflicted on the Ukrainian people? », asked the new representative of the Atlantic Alliance, who took office on October 1st. Trapped by the American electoral context Despite the unprecedented escalation represented by the deployment of North Korean soldiers, no retaliatory measures have been taken publicly, at this stage, by the allies. To the point that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was annoyed by it on several occasions. “The reaction today is nothing, zero,” he declared on October 31, during an interview with the South Korean television channel KBS. “We are trapped by the American electoral context. If this had happened in the spring, we would undoubtedly have reacted differently,” regrets a Western diplomatic source who believes that this new threshold would be able to relaunch the debate on the use of Western long-range weapons to hit targets on Russian territory. . “We have not yet sufficiently drawn out the full dimension” of what is happening, adds the same interlocutor. Also read the decryption | Article reserved for our subscribers Donald Trump’s victory plunges Ukraine into the unknown Read later Beyond the American political context, one of the reasons given to justify this Western hesitation is the difficulty of the allies in corroborating their information on the presence of these North Korean soldiers. First revealed by South Korean intelligence on October 19, the gradual transfer, to the Russian region of Kursk, of these 12,000 soldiers affiliated with the Kim Jong-un regime, has not been confirmed by the United States. as October 23. “The South Koreans have taught the Americans things,” confirms a source close to the matter. “The efforts made to conceal the origin of the troops make assessments difficult,” we also say from the Alliance headquarters in Brussels. You have 61.52% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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