North Korea News Podcast by NK News - How North Korean troops will factor into Ukraine-Russia peace talks

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

North Korean troops have played a pivotal role in Russia’s successful counteroffensive in Kursk, shaping the lay of the land for peace negotiations and setting up a potential expansion of the DPRK��s role. NK News Managing Editor Bryan Betts joins the podcast to discuss the latest developments from the war in Ukraine and how North […]

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as well as much, much more. To find the best fit for you, just head to sign the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Sweatshut and today it is Tuesday, the 18th of March, 2025. It's very snowy day in Seoul, hopefully the last one for this winter. Joining me here in the studio is managing editor, Brian Betts. Brian, welcome back.

Good morning, Jacko. So let's get stuck into North Korea's role in Russia's war against Ukraine. They've been fighting, until now, only fighting in Russian territory, as far as I'm aware, right, in the Kursk region? Correct, in the Kursk region, where Ukraine started making its incursion, I guess it was last August.

And what we've seen is in recent weeks, a sort of change in fortunes. The Russian side has been, has mounted a big counteroffensive. Right. And of course we know the North Korean troops are there and they have been playing a key role in the fighting. Yeah, I heard yesterday that initially the Ukrainians took about a thousand square kilometers in Kursk and that's now been reduced down to almost a third. So it's a real shrinkage based on from what they had. Yeah, I think it's just a really a sliver of territory that they control in K now. Okay, wow.

And yeah, Ukraine has been saying that North Korean troops have played a big role in this. They've described them as the North Korean troops as the main assault force. So they've been suffering some of the heaviest losses. Right, we've heard lots of casualties, dead and injured. And that the North Korean soldiers have often outnumbered Ukraine troops at the ratio of 50 to 6, they said. Gosh, okay. So it seems that the North Korean troops have been providing manpower for this counteroffensive, and it seems to have been successful. And it's a big development that comes as all these US-led push for a ceasefire, for peace negotiations. Right, President Donald Trump is going to talk to President Vladimir Putin today or tomorrow,

very soon, about a possible, what, 30-day unconditional ceasefire to get the peace negotiations on the road. Right. And of course, this incursion by Ukraine into Kursk was part, we think, of the negotiating strategy, right? That if Ukraine holds a bit of Russian territory, it makes it a stronger, puts it in a stronger position in negotiation. But if for Russia, if it clears out all the Ukrainians, that it puts it in a

stronger situation. Exactly. And so now that Russia and North Korea have largely pushed out the Ukrainian troops from Kursk, I think there are, there are kind of two main things to be paying attention to is one, we've already been seeing reports from the Ukrainian military of clashes with Russia and North Korean troops in the border regions. And they say that in some cases,

they've had North Korean troops crossing into Ukrainian territory. This is new. This is new. This is new. And it's a potentially significant a significant, potentially significant change because so far we've been seeing North Korean troops exclusively in Kursk. And so they can kind of even though they have neither side has acknowledged that North Korean troops are there,

they can kind of see how this could be framed as okay this is a this deployment was merely defensive. They were supporting Russia in expelling foreign adversary from their territory. I think that's what Gherki Toleraya said recently on a podcast here. Yes, and now it raises the possibility, are North Korean troops gonna play a more offensive role? Are they going to be crossing into Ukrainian territory?

And that would be a much more provocative act. It would be an escalation. One wonders whether Russia and or North Korea would acknowledge that fact if that were to continue. It seems like the strategy is not to acknowledge it. And given that, I guess the other thing to be paying attention to is negotiations and the question we were asking is how are North Korean troops going to factor into these negotiations? Right, how do you negotiate about something that isn't recognized?

Right, so I think most likely, and the experts we talked to agree, Russia is not going to want to explicitly talk about something that they deny is actually happening. That said, North Korean troops are already influencing the talks, one by helping Russia take Kursk, as you alluded. Ukraine had sort of this idea that they would maybe trade territory in Kursk for some of the captured Russian territory in Ukraine proper, and that's no longer going to work out. But then there's also the fact that, as these North Korean incursions suggest, Russia has

a little bit of leverage here in the sense that there's always this kind of threat that these North Korean troops who have been so successful in Kursk, we could use those in Ukraine as well. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because Russia still has not captured all of the, I think it's three Ukrainian oblasts that it has annexed and held so-called referenda in to make part of Russian territory. So it would have to try to expand its reign there, its governance. Okay, well, let's move on to the second story. So in the, well, let's call it chaos.

In the chaos of the second Trump administration, a lot of things have been cut and closed down. And in the last few days, we've heard that Voice of America and Radio Free Asia staff are all on indefinite administrative leave. What does that mean on efforts to spread info to North Korea? Yeah, so on Friday, Trump issued this executive order that basically gutted the US agency for global media. And this is sort of the umbrella agency that oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Asia,

which are these news outlets. And in addition to reporting news, a big thing that they do is they help broadcast information into North Korea specifically. In the Korean language. In the Korean language, yeah. You know, Voice of America broadcasts in dozens of languages around the world and their operations here in Korea are obviously in Korean. You know, they're...

So VOA specifically would broadcast radio into North Korea for seven hours per day. You know, these are just... You know, it's an extension of its news gathering work. They're trying to present objective news to a listenership in North Korea that is, as we know, one of the most shielded populations in the world, has no access to uncensored media. Right, so it's trying to send it unfiltered

outside information to North Korea, something that we know that the North Korean government does not like one bit. Yes, we've seen, especially in recent years, that they have been cracking down very hard on outside information going into the country. In particular, they're concerned about South Korean dramas, South Korean media, and the popularity of that among especially younger people. But you know, these are also going to be targets for the regime because these are from the US government itself.

US government funded news services. And of course, they are in Korea. So it's readily accessible for the in population. So North Korea, presumably the leaders in Pyongyang will be happy about this new state of affairs. This is something they've complained about for a long time. Gosh, I mean, is this the end of VOA and RFA? Is it a temporary pause?

What do you think? It seems the intention behind this executive order was to reduce the functions of these outlets and the US Agency for global media to the Absolute minimum that is required by law and by all appearances so far. Yes, it appears that they are being almost completely gutted I don't know whether our FA will be able to find other funding sources to keep its operations alive One thing to note is that while both RFA and VOA broadcast into North Korea, they are not the only ones to do so. So it's not as though all efforts to spread information into the country are going to end. BBC Korean, KBS has a program called Han Min-jok. Japan has actually

a radio broadcast they do specifically targeting abductees. Okay, wow. Japanese abductees in North Korea. In North Korea. There's a voice of voice of the martyrs who does religious broadcast. And of course, we know the ROK government does TV broadcast and radio broadcast and loudspeakers and other things like. So there's on the one hand, it's not totally over, even if the US government efforts are gonna be significantly curtailed. But the trouble is that North Korea doesn't like these broadcasts

and they spend a lot of resources to jam radio signals and make sure that these broadcasts are available to as few people as possible. You take out VOA, you take out RFA, you've just freed up more jamming resources that they can then deploy towards these other remaining information sources. Right. Okay. So that is a very serious development there. Let's keep an eye on that and see whether there's something that comes in to fill that vacuum. And lastly, let's talk about a little

human interest story about those people who went to Rasson when it was open for a couple of weeks for tourism and they were using a fitness app to track their running or their movements. Yeah, so Rasson opened in February, closed soon after, but while people were going in while they were tours, there was a tour guide named Zoe Stevens. She works for the tour group, Toriore Tours. Right. And she used a fitness tracking app called Strava. If you're not familiar with it, it's a, it's a very popular app for tracking, especially running and cycling, you know, tracks your GPS location and gives you a

bunch of stats and it's like social media for fitness. Okay. So people who use it, like social media for fitness. Okay. So people who use it, they tend to use it a lot. They use it to track everything they do fitness-wise and it has personal achievements and gamifies fitness and all of that. So it's very popular. She was giving a tour and was leading some tourists on a hike and some mountain in Rosseon and tracked her run or track the hike. And later, I think this was after she left the country, she goes to log into her account and finds that it has been suspended.

And obviously this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of North Korea issues, but it was, you know, concerning for her and she tried to reach out and figure what was going on. And, and it turns out that basically Strava detected that she was in North Korea and said, this is not allowed. And they didn't just, they didn't just delete that particular activity. They actually suspended the entire account. Is that because they considered it a sanctions violation or?

It's, it's because of sanctions concerns, yeah. This is why it's kind of interesting is that it kind of shows the far-reaching and sometimes unexpected impacts of sanctions. In this case, specifically US sanctions from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. This is what Strava cited and said basically we can't offer our service to North Koreans. Ah, okay, because technically they would see it as potentially opening up the possibility of offering services to people within North Korea, including North Koreans.

Yes, and now we know in fact that that is extremely unlikely. A North Korean would need to have a phone and phone number and access to an app store where they could download it, access to the internet. Which North Korean phones do not have as far as we know. Yes, exactly. So it's extremely unlikely, but companies don't want to violate sanctions.

And so in their risk assessments, they go do somewhat extreme measures sometimes. And the other thing I guess that was why this kind of caught people's attention is that this is coming ahead of the Pyongyang marathon, which is going to be held for the first time since 2019. Right. Um, that- With amateur foreign runners participating.

With amateur foreign runners, exactly. And so as far as we know, that's still, despite the closure at Rao Son, that event is still gonna be open to foreigners from most countries. I think the deadline for applications is coming up in a few days. It's a quick turnaround time, but don't track your run with Strava.

Don't use Strava, right? Or perhaps any other foreign app while you're there. You may find yourself in a bit of trouble. Do it with pen and paper and a good old-fashioned step counter. There you go. All right, thanks very much, Brian, and we'll see you again soon. All right, thank you, Jacko. In the intricate world of Korean affairs,

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thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.