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.
(…)
So one intelligence source says 10,000 have already been sent, and another says 3,000 will soon be sent.
These are just rumours. Inconsistent rumours.
This is clickbait for a paywalled article.
This is true for basically everything in a war zone. Some idea is better than no idea IMO. Yes, you have to piece together your own assessment from the data, but I’d prefer to have the data than not.
As far as I can tell these claims are largely coming from Ukrainian sources. I have not seen independent validation from anywhere else. At best we can say is that Ukrainian intelligence claims North Koreans troops are being deployed as part of Russia’s invasion.
Unfortunately, the headline of this article acts as if this is a known fact. A better headline would be include the source of the accusation being made. That’s a problem because most in this thread and the other similar threads are treating the claims made as fact and any reasonable skepticism is downvoted and dismissed.
Well this is true of most news sources. They find a source, make an eye catching headline and story about it. It’s for us to read things and weigh the biases and veracity of the information. I also wish it were otherwise, but it’s not.
I generally agree but with a few caveats.
First, this is a uniquely bad headline. More reputable outlets would report it as something like “Russia denies using North Korean troops in war effort, Ukrainian Intelligence claims otherwise”. That at least allows the reader to understand who is making what claim and whether or not that claim is contested.
Second, most people are not anywhere as skeptical of media outlets as they should be. They may expect bias but rarely do people in western countries expect journalists to regurgitate and launder whatever wild claims state officials make. Unfortunately thats exactly what many new agencies do which is why I think it’s important to talk about when discussing articles like this one.
North Korean troops arriving at a training ground in Eastern Russia
This is something new but I’m still pretty skeptical and I think rightly so. Photos and videos posted to telegram aren’t always what people claim they are. I also haven’t seen any new media willing to say whether or not these videos show what they purport to show. I’d add that it’s also entirely possible for North Korean troops to enter Russia as part of some joint training exercises. However, they may not be intended for deployment in Ukraine.
I’d also be interested to know why the US or NATO do not seem to want to validate any of these claims at this time.
For me seems pretty par for the course in war. Some stuff happens, you get a report from someone who saw it, you get a video, then some more official accounts. That’s how a lot of things happen. If you want to use a very high burden of proof then you will have to wait a while to know what’s going on.
I agree but I also think that a high burden of proof should be the standard for political topics especially armed conflict. If this was a youtube video about a pig saving a goat from drowning I wouldn’t really care if people chose to believe in it or not.
Would be nice but it’s not the case.
So you just had to wait 5 days
Yes, but you don’t have to overstate things in the headline so much.
Good luck convincing anyone here to be skeptical of sources that reinforce their preconceptions of the world. Media literacy is sorely lacking is this thread.
Another story I saw says that North Korean troops were spotted in the Russian military. How could an observer know they were Korean? Were they wearing a Korean uniform? And if so, why haven’t we seen any photos of that? Ukrainians have cameras, right?
Is this just a case of Ukrainians not being able to tell the difference between Buryats and Koreans?
Edit: Come to think of it, it’s more likely a case of Americans not being able to tell the difference between Buryats and Koreans.
I can only imagine their shock when they eventually learn that Russia, a country that spans all of north Asia, has Asians in it.
Part of me thinks “Surely American military intelligence must know there are different ethnic groups in Russia”.
But then I remember how the invasion of Iraq happened in part because the Americans didn’t understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Iraqis.
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I sometimes think of something to say after my original comment.
And is “comrade” supposed to be a dig of some kind? Because it isn’t.
Oh that’s why you reported my post. I just thought you were a communist tankie.
The US understands very well the different religious factions. The way the West Asia region was carved into countries by the colonial powers is identical to what they did in Africa. Deliberately creating countries with internal conflicts that can be exploited for destabilizing them.
However it is easy to tell apart Siberian ethnicities from Koreans. You can also tell apart Eastern Europeans from Western Europeans, leave alone the fact that Korean is an entirely different language from Russian or the languages of the region.
Edit: regarding the languages. In Buryat people speak dialects of Mongolian. Mongolian has a shared ancestry with Turk languages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolic_languages
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The theory of an Altaic language family is generally disregarded by linguists today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
I know. I’m not the one who claimed Turkish is related to Mogolian. The other guy said that.
Did you respond to the wrong person?
You both seemed to be in agreement on that, so…
No, I was not agreeing.
What’s with the downvotes? Are you all Altaicists here?
Who would have thought the worst thing about Lemmy was all the bad linguistics theories.
Edit: Oh, come to think of it, I guess bad anthropological theories are a bit of a staple of American reactionaries.