South Korea claims Pyongyang began moving special forces to Russia earlier this month, days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made a similar accusation that North Korea had sent soldiers and weapons to help support the Kremlin in its war against Ukraine.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement on October 18 that it had tracked the movements of the North's military from October 8 to October 13 and had captured images of North Korea transporting special forces to Russian territory via a Russian transport ship, the first time a Russian Navy vessel had been detected entering North Korean waters since 1990, "confirming the start of the North Korean military's participation in the war."
"The North Korean soldiers dispatched to Russia are currently stationed at Russian military bases in the Far East, including Vladivostok, Ussuriisk, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk, and are expected to be deployed to the front lines as soon as they complete their adaptation training," the NIS statement said.
"The North Korean soldiers were issued Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons, and were also issued fake ID cards of residents of the Yakutia and Buryatia regions of Siberia who looked similar to North Koreans. It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed to the battlefield," it added.
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The statement included maps and photos purportedly backing up the claims, which have not been independently verified.
Speculation over North Korea's role in the conflict has grown amid signs of tightening relations between Moscow and countries such as North Korea and Iran almost 32 months after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based U.S. military think tank, also recently reported that several thousand North Korean troops had arrived in Russia and were being prepared for deployment in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has previously dismissed claims by South Korea that Pyongyang has supplied artillery shells and short-range missiles to Moscow, but has not commented on the latest assertions by either Seoul or Zelenskiy, who on October 14 said that "this is no longer just about transferring weapons. It is actually about transferring people from North Korea to the occupying military forces."
The NIS statement said Ukrainian intelligence services had analyzed North Korean weapons it says Russia has used in the war and found they have "a high defect rate and low accuracy, so they are being used for mass offensives to maintain the front line rather than for precision strikes."
NATO chief Mark Rutte, speaking in Brussels on October 18, said the military alliance could not confirm the reports that North Korean troops were "actively engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine.
Defense ministers from NATO's 32 members are meeting to discuss developments in Ukraine, as well as other issues.