As Kim Jong Un Tests South Korea, Both Choose Ukraine As New Cold War Front
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As frictions between North and South Korea worsen against the backdrop of new geopolitical realities surrounding their shared East Asian peninsula, a new front has erupted half a world away in Eastern Europe, as U.S. officials reportedly see the two rivals backing opposite sides of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
The unresolved feud between the Koreas is the first and longest-running military front of the 20th-century Cold War. Now, experts and former officials with whom Newsweek spoke see the recent spike in tensions as an emerging theater of a new Cold War already manifesting in flashpoints across the globe.
Earlier this month, the White House openly accused Pyongyang of sending a “significant” amount of artillery shells to Moscow under the guise of shipments to third countries in the Middle East and North Africa. About a week later, the Wall Street Journal cited unnamed U.S. officials saying that Washington was preparing to purchase up to 100,000 artillery shells from Seoul to be redirected to Kyiv.
Both Koreas have since dismissed the reports, but their growing support for the two belligerents of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has already come to define their roles in the emerging international order.
“For North Korea, it would be a great thing if the new cold war system comes into play, which means North Korea would be of great importance to China and Russia,” Yang Wook, an assistant research fellow at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies and former policy advisor to South Korea’s National Defense Ministry, told Newsweek.
Communist titans China and the Soviet Union backed North Korea directly seven decades ago in its war against South Korea and a U.S.-led United Nations command, yet this level of support cooled over the years, especially after the fall of the USSR. Today, however, Pyongyang has found itself once again a focal point of great-power competition, and the Ukraine war has provided an opportunity to display its value as a partner on the global stage.
Yang explained that North Korean weapons sales to Russia would constitute a “significant” boon for North Korea’s “badly-needed foreign exports,” especially at a time when the North Korean economy faced a “difficult situation due to the embargo under U.N. sanctions and the downturn caused by COVID-19.”
But he noted the implications are much greater than those of a simple arms transaction.
“These sales can be the very beginning of a long-awaited resumption of Russo-North Korean military cooperation since the end of the Cold War,” Yang said.
Unlike China, which has channeled its growing wealth into new and innovative arms, North Korea has remained largely reliant on Soviet-style weapons systems without access to the latest advances. Yang said that “bilateral cooperation is essential” for Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to bring his armed forces into the new era.
“North Korea wants to prove to the world that it is also the key actor in the international order,” he said, “so in order to draw more attention and concerns, North Korea escalates nuclear threats.”
Three years after the collapse of a historic trilateral peace process between North Korea, South Korea and the U.S., Kim Jong Un has escalated the testing of nuclear-capable weapons, including large, far-reaching missiles and smaller, tactical platforms.
One projectile fell south of the disputed inter-Korean maritime border earlier this month, the first such incident to occur since their 1950s war. In addition, he’s pursued aerial and naval military movements near the border as the U.S. and South Korea intensified joint exercises, all while the world’s gaze was fixed on Ukraine.
Involvement in this conflict also fits into South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s vision for his nation, which he seeks to transform into a “global pivotal state.” Yang notes that this ambitious agenda carries an attendant set of responsibilities, which “means that Korea should increase its engagement in the international community.”
And as South Korea sought support from its U.S. ally and other members of the international community in issues surrounding North Korea, Yang said that Seoul would first need to answer the call in stepping up on other global challenges such as the war in Ukraine.
This approach carries risks, however.
“Such a strategy could make Russia or China increasingly hostile to South Korea,” Yang said, “which would adversely affect the Korean economy.” Securing the supply and value chain, he argued, is “the so-called economic security, and it is one of the major national tasks of the new Yoon government.”
Yoon’s perceived obligations to do more were also recognized by Soo Kim, a former Korea analyst for the CIA who today serves as a policy analyst at the California-based RAND Corporation. She too appreciated Seoul’s desire to tread lightly in this endeavor.
“Seoul also seems to want to approach this more cautiously in view of some sensitivities toward Russian, Chinese, or even North Korean reactions to South Korea sending military aid to Ukraine,” Soo Kim told Newsweek. “Until recently, the ROK government had maintained its position on sending only non-lethal aid to Ukraine.”
Noting the South Korean National Defense Ministry’s position that the howitzer rounds were sold under the assumption that the U.S. would be the end user, something the Pentagon has neither confirmed nor denied, she said Seoul may have found an arrangement to officially uphold this stance while still ultimately doing its part for Kyiv.
“So perhaps Seoul, in an effort to avert criticism and potential backlash from neighbors in the region (e.g., China, Russia, North Korea), is seeking to find ways to indirectly support Ukraine via allies and partners,” she said.
Other powers have also opted to distance themselves from the conflict as reports emerged of their weapons system being used in Ukraine.
Iranian officials have asserted that domestically produced loitering munitions, or “suicide drones,” provided to Russia were sent with an understanding they would not be used in the conflict despite their now being launched openly against Ukrainian cities.
Tehran’s top foe, Israel, has also publicly refused to increase aid to Ukraine, even as reports surfaced of Israeli anti-drone systems being used by Kyiv alongside alleged intelligence cooperation between the two countries, despite the strains that have emerged between the two over Israel’s official position.
As for Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have also denied direct military ties, Soo Kim said the two had a shared interest in expanding cooperation amid the war in Ukraine.
“It’s a window of opportunity for Russia, China, and North Korea to work together against the U.S., Ukraine, and other like-minded countries seeking to reduce Putin’s success factor,” she said.
John Lee, a Seoul-based writer and columnist who hosts the podcast “The Twitter Pundit,” told Newsweek that, “from Seoul’s point of view, the deal is purely a business transaction between two allied nations, and because the country buying the shells is the United States, there is also the element of alliance management.”
“We’ve technically been at war with North Korea since 1950,” Lee pointed out.
But the most “pressing concerns” he saw in the deteriorating inter-Korean dynamic are “missile and nuclear weapons tests and joint alliance military exercises.”
“The military exercises occurring on both sides of the DMZ are a dangerous-looking, intricate dance,” Lee said. “All politics is local. Kim Jong Un needs to appear strong in the face of joint alliance military exercises. Yoon Suk-yeol doesn’t wish to appear weak, either.”
Still, he emphasized that “both leaders know the consequences of losing control,” and “even if both sides decide to respond proportionally to any attack from the other side, it will quickly lead to an all-out war.” He said that “both sides understand this,” and “it is something that both sides wish to avoid.”
As Yoon sought to shore up his own country’s defense posture, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has also sharpened its language toward Kim Jong Un in an apparent recognition of a growing problem on the Korean Peninsula.
The Nuclear Posture Review released late last month by the Pentagon warned that “any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” It added: “There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive.”
The tough rhetoric came as U.S. officials said they were enhancing intelligence gathering on Kim Jong Un in anticipation of a potential seventh nuclear test, which would mark his first in five years, the longest gap yet in the decade-long rule of a leader who saw such weapons as critical to his government’s survival in the face of foreign threats.
In previous years, these tests were unanimously condemned by the United Nations Security Council, including by China and Russia, which long backed international sanctions against North Korea as a result of its missile and nuclear weapons development.
But this rare unity has since dissipated, as Beijing and Moscow now veto further punitive restrictions against Pyongyang, arguing that economic coercion has not resulted in any improvement in the situation, and diplomacy should instead be a priority.
Youngjun Kim, a professor at Korea National Defense University and a member of the National Security Advisory Board for the South Korean president’s office, said that, for North Korea, there was a “golden opportunity from the New Cold War situation.”
“Russia, as an old friend and an alternative partner of China, has been a good neighbor of North Korea,” Youngjun Kim told Newsweek, “and they share high level military commanders visits and meetings.”
And he warned that, if this path continues, “the worst scenario and a game changer in Northeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula is North Korean Army joining Russia-China combined military exercises,” such as the Moscow-led Vostok drills last held in September.
“During the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, North Korea never had any combined military exercise with the Chinese PLA and the Russian Army,” he said. “But now it is on the table for the mid- and long-term. We have to watch and calculate this scenario.”
Faced with these shifting dynamics, Youngjun Kim said that “South Korea faces a dilemma” in both needing “to support Ukraine as a responsible middle-power democratic country” while at the same time needing to “manage its relationship with Russia for the North Korea issue and others.”
And noting South Korea’s lingering denials of military support to Ukraine, he argued that Seoul may instead contribute to peacekeeping operations and economic development once the war is over.
But Yoon’s next course of action may also depend on just how close Kim Jong Un gets to Putin in their burgeoning strategic alignment.
Artyom Lukin, the deputy director for research at the Far Eastern Federal University School of Regional and International Studies in Vladivostok, told Newsweek that, so far, their mutual embrace has been “more about symbolism than substance.”
He did, however, point out some notable developments on the diplomatic track, including North Korea becoming the only U.N. member state to recognize a referendum held in September in four Russian military-held regions of Ukraine to annex them into the Russian Federation.
Lukin explained how “there are various ways Moscow can reward North Korea for its diplomatic support,” including becoming even “less stringent in enforcing international sanctions imposed on the DPRK for its nuclear and missile program,” and deciding to “provide the North with enlarged packages of food assistance” as its economic woes routinely acknowledged even by Kim Jong Un himself persist.
He also argued that any increase in the two Koreas’ roles in the Russia-Ukraine conflict could have ramifications back home as well.
“An indirect involvement of the two Korean states in the Ukraine war may result in more polarization in Northeast Asia and on the Korean peninsula,” Lukin said. “Russia, as Vladimir Putin already warned, will certainly be antagonized by South Korean actions and will try to find ways to pay back.”
Dmitry Stefanovich, a Russian International Affairs Council expert who also serves as a research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) Center for International Security in Moscow, shared Lukin’s skepticism of a growing military relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang at this stage.
At the same time, he noted that Putin just recently warned that any South Korean military assistance to Ukraine “might lead to actual military-technical cooperation between Russia and North Korea, which, obviously, will change the dynamics in a very serious manner, both regionally and globally.”
“I think the most important message here is that Russia has no interest left on having some sort of ‘selective cooperation’ with the U.S., including on new sanctions against against the DPRK,” Stefanovich told Newsweek. “Russia and China developed a framework on de-escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula relatively long ago, but so far there is little progress there, actually more of the opposite.”
And while Stefanovich noted that “relations between Moscow and Seoul have been relatively healthy so far,” he warned that “we can expect anything these days.”
“As for the possibility of an inter-Korean proxy war on Ukrainian territory — well, this is a yet another dimension of the tragedy unfolding,” Stefanovich said.
“Hopefully, in the future,” he added, “less countries would be so ready to provide themselves as a battleground for the conflict of actually global scale.”
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