North Korea has sent a substantial military force to assist Russia in its war with Ukraine. According to US government officials, there are now more than ten thousand North Korean troops on Russian soil. They are expected to take part in a Russian military operation to regain lost territory in the Kursk region.

The US government says that Ukraine’s army has already engaged in combat with soldiers from North Korea, whose presence Vladimir Putin did not deny when questioned at the BRICS summit last month. The deployment is likely to reshape the complexion of a grinding war at the center of Europe as well as the much longer period of military rivalry between the two states on the Korean peninsula.

Long before the North Korean deployment, the Ukraine conflict had already become something of a proxy war for the two Koreas. Two rival sources of artillery shells and ammunition — from South Korea to Ukraine via the United States and Poland, and from North Korea to Russia — have been sustaining a war of attrition between Moscow and Kyiv. The two Korean states have been well positioned to meet the insatiable demand for munitions as their own permanent war footing contrasts with the decommissioning of conventional weaponry in Europe since the end of the Cold War.