Russia is preparing to receive another 30,000 North Korean troops for its war against Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday. The addition would potentially more than double Pyongyang’s current troop commitment to Moscow’s war effort.
Zelenskyy said preparations have been underway in Russia’s Voronezh region since June, and that North Korea is also preparing to transfer additional ballistic-missile launchers. He did not specify a timeline for the deployment, and there has been no independent confirmation that Pyongyang has approved a deployment of that scale.
North Korea has already sent an estimated 15,000 personnel to Russia, according to an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War and Critical Threats Project. Those forces have fought alongside Russian troops in the Kursk region and have taken on rear-area roles that free Russian personnel for frontline duty – a substitution effect that lets Moscow reinforce its war without a politically costly new domestic mobilization.
A further 30,000 troops would extend that logic, adding manpower Russia could deploy either directly in combat or in support roles that release additional Russian units for the front.
The arrangement also runs in the other direction. Zelenskyy said Russia is helping North Korean forces gain combat experience and improve their weapons – exposure to a war shaped by drones, electronic warfare and long-range strikes that Pyongyang has not previously fought at this scale.
Neither government has confirmed the specific figures Zelenskyy cited, and the ballistic-launcher transfer he described has not been independently verified.
