A battalion of 3,000 North Korean soldiers will shortly join Russian troops in fighting Ukraine, marking Pyongyang’s full entry into the war.
Intelligence sources said the unit has been secretly training in Russia’s Far East ahead of deployment as part of a Russian airborne regiment.
“They are called the Buryat Battalion,” a senior Ukrainian military source told Politico. Buryatia is a remote region of Russia bordering Mongolia that the Kremlin has targeted heavily for military recruitment.
The Kyiv Independent quoted another Western intelligence source claiming that North Korea had sent 10,000 soldiers to join the Russian army.
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Seriously - I’m genuinely baffled at the complete geopolitical ineptitude that occurred in 2014. It was a categorical abrogation of the Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty in exchange for their surrender of old Soviet nukes based in their territory.
Nobody is going to make a deal like that going forward. The nuclear non-proliferation movement is entirely dead. Nukes are, categorically, the absolute final word in guaranteeing a country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. There is no substitute. Genuinely, the complete and total lack of meaningful action in the defense of Ukraine was the most apocalyptically stupid geopolitical move that Obama and Merkel made during their stints as leaders of the western world.
Nah, it was second behind the invasion of Iraq and the forever war in Afghanistan. The US’s unwillingness to react was in large part because it had been weakened by a decade of idiotic wars in the Middle East. Europe has no excuse though.
We invaded Iraq ~5 years before Obama was elected…
Yup. Going to hell in a hand basket.