Engineers said to be supporting missile launches and reports of North Koreans killed near Donetsk

North Korean military engineers have been deployed to help Russia target Ukraine with ballistic missiles, and North Koreans operating in occupied areas of Ukraine have already been killed, senior officials in Kyiv and Seoul said.

There are dozens of North Koreans behind Russian lines, in teams that “support launcher systems for KN-23 missiles”, a source in Ukraine told the Guardian.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, last year travelled to Russia for a summit with Vladimir Putin where the two men bolstered their deepening ties with a secret arms deal.

Pyongyang’s ammunition shipments were vital in allowing Russian forces to advance in a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine this summer. But it appears increasingly clear that the agreement went beyond supplying materiel.

  • @foggy
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    288 hours ago

    Imagine being an educated Russian 45 year old conscript fighting next to malnourished north koreans.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 hours ago

      Are we assuming the Russian conscript has a higher degree of education than the north Korean?

      They’re both totalitarian shitholes shoving their own version of lies down their citizens throats.

      • @foggy
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        6 hours ago

        There are FAR, FAR more well educated Russians than there are North Koreans, let alone Educated North Koreans.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 hours ago

          Yes but I doubt they are getting sent to Ukraine. The ethnic minority regions that Russia keeps dirt poor are sent 70:1 in some cases compared to recruits from Moscow. And I’d bet it’s a big ratio also between the well educated and poorly educated in Moscow too.

        • @Duamerthrax
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          65 hours ago

          There were reports of Russian soldiers in Ukraine not knowing what an “Automatic Toilet” was. They’re grabbing people from so far in the boonies, that they bring in buckets of water to flush their toilets. That also means that either Russian barracks don’t have toilets or they’re shipping their forces to the front lines without any training.

            • @[email protected]
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              93 hours ago

              He means they only know how to shit in a hole in the ground. That kind of poverty tends to not go hand in hand with the top educational institutions.

              • @Duamerthrax
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                2 hours ago

                From how understand it, they have toilets in the sticks, but they don’t automatically fill themselves. They have a bucket of water that they pour into the toilet to flush it. It’s also not so much that they don’t have automatic toilets, but that they didn’t even know they exist. The poor, wilderness communities that Putin is pulling from are that isolated from the rest of the word. The American equivalent would be the Appalachian people.

                Here’s a clip of Zelenskyy referencing the toilet situation.

      • @[email protected]
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        6 hours ago

        They are worlds apart yes. Russia actually has an amazing academia network that is suffering greatly from Putins politics. Most recently seen by hundreds of academics having to stop their collaboration with CERN because of the war. Compared to NK, Russia is just a normal country with lots of IT and science nerds.

        However if you look at the US and their rural MAGA population, it shows that there can just be a massive rift within the population. And thats what you have in Russia too i would assume.

        • @[email protected]
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          124 minutes ago

          Much of the respect we have for Russian education goes back to the excellent STEM education they had in the Soviet days. This has largely been eroded away in modern times, and much of the technology and infrastructure they have are being held together by Soviet educated older folks.

      • @[email protected]
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        86 hours ago

        I would assume that considering Russians actually have internet.

        I’m also going to assume the Russian soldiers are atleast 6 inches taller on average since South Korean soldiers are that much taller than North Korean soldiers.