BRUSSELS: If North Korea were to send troops to Ukraine to fight on Russia’s behalf it would significantly escalate the conflict, NATO Chief Mark Rutte said on social media platform X on Monday.
Rutte, who took office at NATO at the start of the month, said he had a discussion with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol about the alliance’s close partnership with Seoul, focusing on defense industrial cooperation and the interconnected security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions.
South Korea’s foreign ministry summoned on Monday the Russian ambassador in Seoul in protest over what it has called the dispatch of North Korean troops to Russia for deployment in Ukraine and pledged a joint international response.
South Korea’s first vice foreign minister Kim Hong-kyun called in Georgy Zinoviev, the top Russian envoy to Seoul, and urged the immediate withdrawal of North Korean soldiers from Russia, the ministry said in a statement.
Kim said the participation of North Korean troops in the war in Ukraine violated UN resolutions and the UN charter and posed serious threats to the security of South Korea and beyond.
“We condemn North Korea’s illegal military cooperation, including its dispatch of troops to Russia, in the strongest terms,” the ministry quoted Kim as saying.
“We will respond jointly with the international community by mobilizing all available means against acts that threaten our core security interests.”
Phone calls to the Russian embassy went unanswered. The ministry said Zinoviev told Kim that he would relay the message to Moscow.
Meanwhile Russia on Monday vowed to maintain cooperation with North Korea after reports of Pyongyang’s troops being trained to fight for Moscow in Ukraine.
“North Korea is our close neighbor and partner and we develop relations in all areas and it’s our sovereign right. We will continue developing this cooperation further,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, while declining to answer a question on whether Russia is using North Korean troops.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week that North Korea was preparing to send 10,000 soldiers to help Moscow’s war effort, and that some North Korean officers were already deployed on Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
The West has long accused North Korea of supplying weapons to Russia. Rutte and the Pentagon both said last week that they have found no evidence yet of a North Korean military presence on the ground in Ukraine.
