North Korea Sent Russia Four Brigades

First video of North Koreans training in Russia.

UPDATE: This BBC piece says just 1,500 soldiers, and other sources report the same. This piece indicates there are another 10,000 queued up to go, but they aren’t there yet. Suchomimus is top notch citizen journalism, but no editor, it’s just Jack, helping us keep track of happenings in Ukraine. He apparently added the there/coming numbers to come up with the 12k figure.

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This is the first public proof I’ve seen of the presence of four North Korean brigades in Russia. That’s about twelve thousand men total. They’ll be rested, likely much better trained than the typical Russian units, and less technically adept. We do not know precisely what “better trained” means, as North Korean troops haven’t engaged in large scale conflict since the cease fire in 1953.

If you opened this, you would likely be interested in this Atlantic Council piece, which suggests the course of forming a collective armory. Ukraine’s annual need for 155mm artillery shells is around a million pieces, and the whole world does not have the capacity to supply them. The same holds true for any other war goods you can name. We’ve had three decades of post-Cold War and two decades of counter-insurgency adjusting our views. Now industrial scale war has returned to Europe and we’re having a late 1930s Oh, shit! moment.

In a war against China, the US could quickly exhaust its weapons. A new Indo-Pacific defense initiative might be the answer.