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.
(…)
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.
That was absolutely not clear from this brief comment:
[EDIT: Comment has been deleted.]
So you’re saying your comment was just violating our incivility rule?
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.