Russia is training in Siberia a battalion of 3,000 North Korean soldiers to fight in Ukraine, multiple Ukrainian sources say. Dubbed “the Buryat Battalion,” the Korean People’s Army soldiers are training in Buryatia, a Russian republic whose Mongolian-ancestry inhabitants share linguistic and cultural affinities with Koreans.

The training comes as Russia’s parliament, the Duma, prepares to ratify this week a mutual defense pact with North Korea. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow yesterday that the pact “implies truly strategic deep cooperation in all areas, including security.”

North Korea’s expeditionary force got off to a shaky start yesterday with Ukrainian press reports that one platoon of 18 North Korean soldiers deserted four miles from the Ukrainian border in the Kursk Region. Presumably wearing Russian Army uniforms, this lost platoon may be seeking to defect to the West. The unit reportedly was stationed in a quiet section of the border in order to free up Russian troops to fight Ukrainian troops occupying a small section of Kursk.

In a war where 1,000 Russian troops are killed or wounded daily, the Buryat Battalion may seem insignificant. Analysts, though, worry that today’s trickle could become tomorrow’s flood. With 1,280,000 active duty soldiers, North Korea’s Army is the fourth largest in the world, after those of China, India, and America, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 

Yesterday, the Kyiv Independent news site quoted a Western diplomat saying that 10,000 North Korean soldiers are training in Russia. Two years ago, Russian state TV said North Korea had offered 100,000 “volunteers” to help Russia. 

Fueling American uneasiness are memories of October 1950, when 200,000 Chinese People’s Volunteer Army troops poured across the Yalu River. They saved North Korea’s communist regime from collapse and sent American units reeling back to Seoul.

“We see an increasing alliance between Russia and regimes like North Korea,” President Zelensky warned Ukrainians in his nightly address Monday. “This is no longer just about transferring weapons. It is actually about transferring people from North Korea to the occupying military forces.” 

Fresh from a tour of European capitals, Ukraine’s leaders said the arrival of the first foreign troops in the war should be a wakeup call to Western nations to back Ukraine to avoid a wider war. Mercenaries could relieve President Putin of the need to impose a second national callup. Two years ago, the first national draft prompted about 1 million Russian men to flee the country.

“Such a move would also indicate a new level of desperation for Russia as it continues to suffer significant casualties on the battlefield in its brutal war against Ukraine,” a White House National Security Council spokesman, Sean Savett, said in a statement yesterday. 

Russia, in its two-and-a-half year old war against Ukraine, has suffered 671,400 casualties — almost 10 times the Soviet dead and wounded during Moscow’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The numbers come from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and are generally accepted by America and Britain.

North Korean soldiers arrive as Russia already relies heavily on its former protégé for arms. According to the Times of London, North Korea has supplied half of the artillery shells that Russia has fired at Ukrainian positions this year. Given high rates of duds and misfires, it appears Pyongyang has been dealing from the bottom of the deck — selling 70-year-old shells from the Korean War era. Despite their poor quality, North Korean shells have allowed Russia to maintain a three to one advantage over Ukraine in artillery fires.

As the alliance took shape this year, North Korea reportedly sent 150 construction workers to Russia-controlled Donetsk last spring to work on reconstruction. In the summer, North Korean military engineers were sent to Russian front line areas to advise on tunnel construction. 

Advisors came to improve the telemetry of  50 North Korean KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles sold to Russia. Two weeks ago, the first casualties became public. A Ukrainian missile hit a military gathering in Russia-occupied Donetsk, killing 20 people, including six North Korean officers.

In return for the armaments, advice, rockets and construction labor, North Korea gets cash, food, and, reportedly, technology to help it deploy spy satellites as well as tanks and aircraft. Believed to possess 50 nuclear weapons, North Korea also seeks rocketry technology from Russia.

Back in June, when Mr. Putin traveled to Pyongyang to sign the mutual defense treaty with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un,  Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder warned: “If I were North Korean military personnel management, I would be questioning my choices on sending my forces to be cannon fodder in an illegal war against Ukraine.”

The possible deployment of North Korean troops in Ukraine, he said, is “something to keep an eye on.”

Moscow’s fig leaf of calling the North Korean units the “Buryat Brigade” plays on affinities between the two North Asian groups. While Moscow has largely isolated Buryatia from the outside world, neighboring Mongolia has developed a thriving partnership with South Korea.

With seven airlines competing to fly passengers between Mongolia and South Korea, jets last year carried almost 300,000 travelers between Seoul  and Ulaanbaatar’s Chinggis Khaan International Airport. An estimated 10 percent of Mongolia’s 3.4 million people have studied or worked in South Korea. The largest  Mongolian community overseas— about 50,000 people — is in South Korea. 

Last year, South Korea’s prime minister, Han Duck-soo, welcomed to Seoul his Mongolian counterpart, Prime Minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene, marveling how “the similarities in our languages and cultures have elevated” their “bilateral relationship remarkably.”

A free market democracy, Mongolia also has quietly received thousands of North Koreans fleeing North Korea through China. Across the border in Ulan Ude, capital of Russia’s Buryatia, there is virtually no Korean presence. Baikal International Airport offers only flights to Russian destinations. 

However, in addition to playing on affinities of ancestry, the Kremlin focuses Russia’s military draft on impoverished and politically weak minorities. In the Ukraine war, studies indicate that Buryats are almost four times as likely to be killed as those with Russian ancestry.

While this week’s events may not prove to be this generation’s equivalent of China crossing the Yalu River, veteran security analysts, Mark Toth and Colonel Jonathan Sweet warned last week in The Hill: “This is a significant escalation in the Ukraine war — a third-party nation with military ‘boots on the ground’ directly or indirectly supporting combat operations.”