North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s decision to send thousands of troops to fight alongside Russia will earn him up to $25 million a month – but some sources say the troops could quickly be wiped out.

Kim deployed around 12,000 elite North Korean troops to the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield – known as the meat grinder because of the high number of casualties, particularly on the Russian side – last month, and sources say that he received $2,000 per month per soldier.

That’s a huge sum for this hermit country where food is scarce and many of its 26 million people are starving. according to a 2023 BBC report.

However, Russian generals are not maximizing the use of crack said “Body of Storms” North Korean experts told the Post.

Language barriers, cultural conflicts and decisions as apparently disguise North Korean soldiers resembling Russian fighters from Siberia may have contributed to what at least one U.S. official called “significant” number of North Korean casualties to date.

Rather than deploying the North Koreans in their own contained units, Russian commanders would mix them with Russian squads – with disastrous results. This led a confused Russian unit to abandon the North Koreans stationed with it on the battlefield when they did not realize who they were.

“They’re wasted,” said Asia expert Gordon Chang, author of “Red Plan: China’s plan to destroy America” told the Post.

“It’s crazy. They’re too pretty to be used as cannon fodder, but that’s what’s happening. We wonder how they are used. If kept in their own autonomous units they could be absolutely deadly fighting the Ukrainians. But that doesn’t happen.

The “Storm Corps” – or special forces – are considered the “best trained” and, especially in a hungry country, the “best fed” of the entire North Korean army.

However, the quality of this food remains questionable. German tabloid Bild reported that as part of the North Korean troop deployment, Russian soldiers can be seen in various Telegram videos – which have not been verified – handling canned goods with the words – “Nureongi dog meat” written on them in Korean letters.

“Nureongi” are medium-sized dogs with short, brownish fur. This breed of Spitz is a popular eating dog in Korea. On the back it says: “Product intended exclusively for the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. »

One wonders why Kim, 40, would want to sacrifice part of the elite troops. The official name of the Storm Corps in North Korea is the 11th Corps of the Korean People’s Army.

“But remember, Kim doesn’t care about his people,” Sean King said. an Asia specialist at Park Strategies told the Post. As a dictator, “he doesn’t have to worry about being re-elected. Hundreds of thousands of people died in North Korean labor camps.”

Ukrainian soldiers fought North Korean troops on November 4, along the Russian border, the first skirmish since foreign fighters were deployed to help Moscow’s forces in Kursk, western Russia, in their ongoing war, which has been raging since February 2022.

The region was previously under Russian control until Ukrainian forces, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, retook it earlier this year.

Over the past year, North Korea has sent about 8 million artillery shells and dozens of modern short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to support Putin’s war effort.

“It is not yet clear how the troops will be used, but they will likely be used for combat more than anything else,” according to Bruce Klingner, a former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency veteran, now at the Heritage Foundation.

“Given that Russia uses a WWI-like approach to trench warfare and there’s not really an integrated command structure, it’s not going to be easy for them,” Klinger added , who has studied North and South Korea for 31 years. years.

“Messages have already been intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence services that the Russians did not know what to do with them. We also question the quality of their training. They may be special forces, but it is a mistake to consider them in the same league as the Navy Seals, for example.”

The North Korean soldiers, who are mostly in their late teens and early 20s, have never left the ultra-controlled hermit kingdom, where most citizens have no internet access and are deprived many fundamental freedoms taken for granted elsewhere.

But few North Korean academics believe a recent article by Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times who wrote about previously. As a result, they binge on pornography.

Bruce E. Bechtol Jr., a professor of political science Angelo State University in Texas, who has written numerous books on North Korea, said he doubted the troops even had smartphones or computers in their possession.

“In North Korea, you need a signed letter from Kim Jong Un to use the Internet and even then it’s tightly controlled,” Bechtol told the Post. “And remember that of those 12,000 soldiers sent to Russia, 500 military officers and three generals accompanied them. They have a lot of surveillance.

“It’s not like they’re a bunch of Marines deployed to the Philippines and going out to clubs to meet girls every night.”

Greg Scarlatoiuchairman and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said he believed the pornographic story was a “psychological operation carried out by the Ukrainian side.”

But if they watch porn — even if it’s a dirty, old-school magazine — or consider defecting, North Korean soldiers are playing a very risky game, experts say.

North Korea is famous “three generations of punishment” The rule that three entire generations of a person’s family must be punished for their sins by sending them to a gulag prison camp still stands in North Korea.

Additionally, Kim Jong Un reportedly “isolated” soldiers’ families in case there were heavy casualties and the families spoke to their villages.

Most worrying, Chang said, is that by drawing North Korea into the volatile war between Russia and Ukraine, Russia is escalating the conflict beyond Ukraine and Russian territory.

“It is not inconceivable that Ukraine could strike North Korea in retaliation,” Chang said.

Bechtol said that contrary to popular belief, North Korea has involved its military several times over the years in Africa, the Middle East and Vietnam – but has never deployed ground troops on this scale before.

North Korea’s military advisers helped form a wing of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe’s feared Fifth Brigade in the early 1980s. This led to the Fifth Brigade. massacre 20,000 people in Matebeland in 1983.

North Korean pilots fought alongside North Vietnam against the United States in the 1960s and provided military support to Egypt and Syria against Israel.

North Korean leaders in the capital Pyongyang also sent specialists and perhaps some ground troops to Syria to fight on behalf of Bashar Al-Assad’s government in 2016-2017 during their civil war and helped train Ethiopian fighters in their ongoing wars with Eritrea in the 1980s.

Western countries have criticized the North Korean deployment as a sinister escalation of the conflict.

“The first fighting with North Korean soldiers marks a new chapter in global instability,” Zelensky said. “Together with the whole world, we must do everything to ensure that this Russian move to expand the war – this real escalation – becomes a loss. »

Scarlatoiu said he thinks the war will become so bloody for North Koreans that they won’t even want to defect to the “evil” and unknown West and will just want to return home.

Although they have been described as callous and inexperienced, North Korean soldiers are well trained and disciplined, he said. “They will experience so much sweat and tears that I think they will miss their hometowns in North Korea, no matter how hard they are.”