If South Korea infringes on North Korean waters, airspace or territory one more time, a senior official in the secretive nation recently warned, an “immediate retaliatory attack will be launched.”
On Saturday, a North Korean Defense Ministry official said authorities had discovered a South Korean drone in one of Pyongyang’s districts that “crashed” up to a week earlier. It was designed for long-range reconnaissance, Pyongyang said, and may have been meant to spread anti-regime messaging, according to North Korea’s KCNA state news agency.
Should it happen again, the official said, North Korea would be forced to respond.
This type of bellicose messaging isn’t new from Pyongyang.
“North Korea’s one-sided claims are not worth verifying, nor do they merit a response,” the South Korean Defense Ministry said after the alleged drone attack. But “if the safety of our citizens is threatened in any way,” South Korea has since said, “our military will respond with stern and thorough retaliation.”
A Newsweek illustration. Months of souring relations between Pyongyang and Seoul have prompted questions, and fears, about whether North Korea could be readying itself for a war against its southern neighbor.
A Newsweek illustration. Months of souring relations between Pyongyang and Seoul have prompted questions, and fears, about whether North Korea could be readying itself for a war against its southern neighbor.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
Tensions on the divided peninsula are the worst in years. Earlier this month, North Korea blew up parts of roads and railway lines heading for the border after its army said it would “completely separate” the two Koreas under the cloud of the “imminent danger of war.”
The two nations are still technically at war and have been since an armistice marked the end of the Korean War in 1953.
With Pyongyang now thought to have sent troops to Russia, possibly for deployment in Ukraine, North Korea’s somewhat surprising moves beg the question: Could the hermit nation now be seriously preparing for war with its southern neighbor?
Flashpoints of Tension
North Korea’s path in recent years, under the hand of supreme leader Kim Jong-un, has veered in a new direction, with the language around the reported drone incursions and the severing of transport across the peninsula a key part of this, said Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies.
Pyongyang has formally renounced the goal of reunification with the south, a decades-held objective that has cast Seoul as the “principal enemy.” Flashpoints of tension such as rubbish-filled balloons gliding over the de-facto border and speakers blasting across the demilitarized zone have dotted the past few months of spiky relations.
Inter-Korea summits in previous years are now firmly a thing of the past, Kim pulling the country far closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin while Seoul’s anxieties deepen over the hand-up Moscow is believed to be providing to Pyongyang with its weapons—including nuclear—development programs.
It is North Korea’s domestic and foreign policy that have taken a real turn in the past few years, Yeo told Newsweek.
“They’re signaling, of course, to South Korea and the rest of the world, that they no longer seek reunification,” Yeo said. “But it’s definitely, I think, in part, to reinforce this idea for their own people in preparation for, perhaps, something bigger.”
“I think they’re using all this to try to illustrate to their people that South Korea really is a hostile state, that they want to absorb North Korea.”
North Korea and Russia
But any kind of concerted attack on the south is not a short-term goal, Yeo said.
“North Korea is not ready to attack,” he said. “We would see much more mobilization towards the inter-Korea border if that were the case, but this is laying the groundwork to set up for a more hostile policy with South Korea.”
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, agreed, saying: “There is no sign of unusual movements from the North Korean military that indicate war preparations, in the way that there were signs when Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine.
“If the Kim regime was preparing for a conflict, it would want to keep all its troops ready inside the North itself,” he told Newsweek.
The U.S. confirmed on Wednesday that it had “evidence” of North Korean troops in Russia, after South Korea and Ukrainian officials said upwards of 10,000 of Pyongyang’s fighters were being sent to Russia.
South Korea’s spy agency said on Wednesday that an estimated 3,000 personnel had arrived at Russian bases, with the remaining 7,000 to be deployed by the end of the year, according to South Korean media. This is double the initial figure of special forces personnel in Russia given by the agency last week.
Ukrainian military intelligence has suggested that about one-quarter of the roughly 10,000 troops would initially head for the southern Russian Kursk region, where clashes are ongoing with Ukrainian troops.
So far, no formal military forces from a country outside the Russia-Ukraine war has committed troops to the front lines, a move that would be a significant shift.
Pyongyang, which signed a mutual defense pact with Moscow earlier this year, has provided significant munitions and missiles for Russia’s war effort.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) previously said North Korean soldiers, sent to a number of bases in Russia’s far east, had been equipped with Russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and fake documents claiming the fighters were residents of regions in Siberia.
“It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed to the battlefield,” the NIS said. The soldiers are “expected to be deployed to the front lines as soon as they complete their adaptation training,” the agency added.
Footage published online by Russian and Ukrainian sources in recent days appears to show North Korean soldiers at a Russian training ground in the far-eastern Primorsky region, which borders North Korean territory.
For North Korea, though, there could be major benefits of having its troops see action up against Ukrainian forces—something South Korea is likely aware of.
“These are opportunities for North Korea to really strengthen their military,” Yeo said. “I think that North Korea wants its troops to gain first-hand knowledge of Russia’s experience on the battlefield,” Pacheco Pardo added.
Approximately 10,000 troops is a fraction of its 1.2 million-strong army, which has not seen combat since the 1950s.
“In particular, North Korea can get valuable insights on the way its weapons work, or don’t work, in a real war scenario, given that Russia is using missiles and artillery shells provided by the Kim regime.”
The Guardian reported earlier this month that “dozens” of North Korean military engineers had been deployed to help out Russia with launching Pyongyang’s KN-23 missiles, citing an anonymous Ukrainian source.
In February, Kyiv’s SBU security service said Russia had fired more than 20 Hwasong-11 missiles, also known as KN-23 and KN-24 missiles, into Ukraine since late December, killing at least two dozen civilians in that time.
The Hwasong-11 is thought to be similar to Russia’s Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile, prompting speculation about Moscow’s role in the development of the weapon.
But there are questions over how accurate or effective the North Korean missiles are. Testing the missiles—and making its troops battle-ready—could help Pyongyang tweak and upgrade its technology in preparation for domestic use.
It does, however, also give Western governments and their allies, like South Korea, a chance to analyze the north’s current arsenal.
“I’m not saying that North Korea wants a conflict right now, but it’s like turning a large ship around, it takes some time,” Yeo said.
“It’s more of a longer-term shift to improve their capabilities, to improve their posture, and improve their readiness, as opposed to getting ready to attack South Korea right now.”