Military spokespeople and defense experts debate whether North Korean soldiers will be more than Moscow’s ‘cannon fodder’

Officials in Kyiv told The Financial Times that special forces troops comprise only a small fraction of the 3,000 North Korean soldiers they’ve tracked inbound to Russia’s western Kursk region.

The Ukrainian military says these men “could be used as ‘cannon fodder’ by the Russians,” though Yang Uk, a defense expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, told FT that he expects North Korean soldiers to join defensive operations. Others who spoke to the newspaper, like Kookmin University expert Andrei Lankov, stressed that Pyongyang would be reluctant to risk “risk large-scale defections” or expose too many men to “foreign ideas and influences.”