Who Is Behind North Korea’s Expeditionary Force in Europe?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

‘For the first time in its history,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Monday, “Russia cannot wage war without reinforcements from North Korea.” That was less a note of triumphalism than a warning. The DPRK isn’t just providing Russia with munitions anymore — they’ve become a source for ballistic missiles and even troops, as Zelensky observed. And the threat this expeditionary force poses is not limited to Ukraine.

 

“The more North Korean strikes there are here in Ukraine, in Europe,” he wrote, “the more their missiles and soldiers are used, the more they correct their shortcomings and blind spots, the greater the danger will later be for Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and other countries in the region.”

 

The DPRK’s involvement in Russia’s war of conquest is not new. Despite Moscow’s protests over the West’s interference in the war, the Kremlin sought to internationalize its conflict within its first months — importing North Korean rockets and artillery shells for use on Ukraine’s battlefields as early as September 2022.

 

Pyongyang’s contributions to Russia’s campaign deepened at the end of 2024, when South Korean intelligence warned that it had seen indications that North Korea was deploying special forces units to Ukraine (which NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte subsequently confirmed). The capture of North Korean soldiers by Ukrainian forces on the war’s frontlines indicates that these troops have been deployed in an expeditionary posture — not exclusively to beat back Ukrainian incursions into Russian territory, as the Kremlin claimed.

 

According to Zelensky, the DPRK is further entrenching itself in Russia’s war, and its commitments are significant. A “decision has been made for 30,000 ⁠to 50,000 North Koreans to be deployed on the territory of Russia,” he wrote. Reuters all but confirmed Zelensky’s warnings in early August. “A North Korean missile unit has begun deploying to western Russia and could ​be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine,” its dispatch read.

 

From the West’s perspective, there are two ways to look at this. One is encouraging.

 

The myth that Russia holds in reserve an inexhaustible supply of military-age men ready and willing to be tossed into the meat grinder is encountering a real test of its durability. Military recruitment is down by 20 percent compared with the first quarter of 2025 despite the incredible financial incentives that Moscow offers to new recruits. “Russia has begun to lose more troops than it can recruit,” read a May report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

 

Moreover, there are few indications that Russia can replenish its losses without issuing a general mobilization order. Leery of the unrest such an order might yield, Vladimir Putin has held that option in reserve. But he may not be able to hold out for much longer.

 

But the second takeaway is that the anti-American axis will not give up on Russia so easily.

 

The DPRK is aligned with Russia, but it is dependent on China. Knowing this, the Biden administration in its final year put public and private diplomatic pressure on Beijing to rein in its North Korean vassal. They apparently received reassuring nods from their Chinese counterparts. Indeed, reporting in Western outlets indicated that Xi Jinping’s regime was “uneasy” with North Korea’s participation in Russia’s war.

 

But the Chinese themselves were saying something different. “North Korea’s presence could thus be seen as a complementary deterrent to Russia’s nuclear options, adding a new layer to Russia’s defense capabilities while signaling to the West the depth of its strategic alliances​​,” read an analysis authored by a research fellow at China’s Charhar Institute. Far from “uneasy,” he said that China had given a “silent nod” to the emerging “North Korea-Russia partnership.”

 

Perhaps Beijing’s hands were tied. As the U.S. Army War College’s Brian Carlson observed, the People’s Republic has leverage over its partners in Pyongyang, but it has declined to deploy it to block these deployments. That is a departure from China’s past practices. “The perception of a consolidated China-Russia-North Korea bloc could also further strengthen US alliances,” he wrote, which Beijing would like to avoid — for now, at least.

 

China doesn’t just fear instability on the Korean Peninsula and the weakening of the DPRK as a buffer against the West. Most worryingly from Beijing’s perspective, the deployment of North Korean soldiers to a war zone on NATO’s doorstep increases the risk of miscalculation and a potentially catastrophic point of contact between the two worlds that could implicate Beijing in an international incident.

 

But all those concerns seem to have been subordinated to China’s other interests: preserving its influence with Pyongyang and Moscow and, more importantly, ensuring that Russia does not outright lose its expansionist war.

 

In unusually frank remarks to the European Union’s Kaja Kallas in the summer of last year, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi admitted that “Beijing did not want to see a Russian loss in Ukraine because it feared the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing,” the South China Morning Post reported. That admission aligns with the general perception of China’s posture toward the war. It might not have wanted Russia to invade Ukraine, but it cannot abide a Ukrainian victory.

 

The Ukrainians may not take this lying down, as the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan explains. Kyiv has the capability and rationale, now, to execute retaliatory strikes on North Korean targets, perhaps even as far afield as the Sea of Japan. “Alternatively,” he writes, “Ukrainian operatives could target North Korean intelligence and military officers and their networks around the world.”

 

The war in Ukraine has long had global implications, but it now has global participants. And there’s no indication that any combatant in this fight is eager to back down. Rather, in the middle of its fourth year, Putin’s war of conquest is ramping up.