Ukraine at war with Russia (N. Korea-Iran, too)
Last week was clearly a week for making history. That observation isn’t primarily sparked by Donald Trump’s presidential election victory — he’s now the only US president besides Grover Cleveland to win two non-consecutive terms — but to a much less reported event half a world away, whose consequences Trump will have to deal with when he takes office in January.
As the Pentagon has now confirmed, the North Korean regime has deployed up to 12,000 troops to fight alongside its Russian ally nearly three years after Moscow launched its brutal aggression against Ukraine. They clashed with Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk salient, marking the first time that an outside party has fired a shot in this war.
Time will tell whether the North Koreans will make a significant difference to the actual progress of the war. A story that did the rounds in recent days centered upon a captured Russian soldier caught on video claiming that his unit was accidentally fired on by the very same North Koreans supposed to be fighting alongside them, suggesting that Pyongyang has dispatched cannon fodder rather than crack troops.
“We tried to explain to them where to aim, but I think they shot two of our own,” the soldier explained. “I decided it was better to surrender in this situation than to be killed by our own bullet.”
That probably shouldn’t be surprising; while North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has called his 1 million-man army “the strongest” in the world, none of the Hermit Kingdom’s soldiers have any meaningful combat experience.
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The other aspect here is geopolitical — the coming together of two tyrannical regimes to crush the independence of a post-Communist democracy allied with the European Union and the United States.
By choosing North Korea as his partner in war, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has signaled that no state is off-limits when it comes to seeking allies. For as bad and repressive as Russia is internally, North Korea is even worse; as I’ve written before, the “Democratic People’s Republic” is not so much an independent country as it is a concentration camp with a seat at the United Nations.
With his relations with Western nations at a nadir, Putin has become increasingly reliant on countries like China, Iran and North Korea for diplomatic and military support, as well as those states that are either existing or aspiring members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc of states, who present themselves as an alternative to the US-dominated international institutions that emerged after World War II. Iran has supplied Russia with missiles and Shahed drones that have been used to devastating effect against Ukrainian cities and towns.
In the case of North Korea, Putin and Kim signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership treaty” when the Russian leader visited Pyongyang in June that pledges both countries to come to the defense of the other in the event of an attack.
For Moscow, the North Korean troops for the time being offer a practical alternative to recruiting yet more Russians to fight in a war that has already taken the lives of more than 700,000 of them, along with thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. For the North Koreans, assisting Russia will bring in much-needed cash into Kim’s coffers, as well as Russian know-how in the development of Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
What this means is that Ukraine isn’t just fighting Russia but also North Korea and Iran. The implications of this for Ukraine, as its civilians and armed forces face yet another freezing winter with dwindling supplies, are the gravest of all. But in the longer term, Ukraine’s ostensible allies will also bear the costs of this alignment of autocracies.
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In the Middle East, the effects of Russia’s belligerent foreign policy have been manifest for more than a decade, given its aggressive backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime during the civil war in that country.
Israel has had to tiptoe around the Russian presence in Syria as it has attempted to deal with Iran’s use of both Syria and Lebanon as a staging ground for its proxies’ attacks upon the Jewish state. Because of that, in the wake of the Ukraine invasion three years ago, Israel considered and then essentially rejected the proposal that it should actively back the democratic government in Kyiv with weapons and training.
That prudence was understandable, but it has not curtailed the Russians, whose attitude to the Jewish state is increasingly returning to the demonizing approach witnessed during the Cold War as it cultivates terrorist groups from Hamas in Gaza to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
For Putin, the war triggered by the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 has been a blessing. In terms of world attention, his war in Ukraine has been eclipsed by the fighting in the Middle East, with the grim result that the authentic genocide that Russia is waging against its southern neighbor has been largely ignored as patently false claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza have mushroomed.
As we enter the lame duck phase of President Joe Biden’s administration, a fundamental reassessment is therefore necessary — specifically, understanding how the wars in Ukraine and on multiple fronts in the Middle East interact with each other, and at what points Western, Israeli and Ukrainian interests intersect and where they might diverge.
Ultimately, both Ukraine and Israel are fighting against the same set of enemies. At stake is not just their security — one might even say their very survival — but the values and policies embodied by both the NATO alliance and US foreign policy.
How America and its allies respond now will determine our stance towards this so-called “Axis of Resistance” for a generation.
Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
