South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it condemns North Korea’s arms shipment to a private Russian military company, the Wagner Group, adding it supports the US’ push to raise the issue at the UN Security Council.
The Wagner Group took delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine, a sign of the group’s expanding role in that conflict, the White House said on Thursday.
Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin denied the assertion as “gossip and speculation.”
Photo: Reuters
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wagner was searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine.
“We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment. Last month, North Korea delivered infantry rockets and missiles into Russia for use by Wagner,” he said.
The Wagner Group was founded in 2014 after Russia seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
The US estimates that Wagner has 50,000 personnel deployed in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts recruited from Russian prisons, Kirby said.
Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Kirby had a habit of making statements based on conjecture.
“Everyone knows that North Korea has not been supplying any weapons to Russia for a long time. And no such efforts have even been made,” he said in a statement. “Therefore, the supply of weapons from North Korea is nothing but gossip and speculation.”
The US assessment is that the amount of material delivered by North Korea would not change the battlefield dynamics, but more military equipment is expected to be delivered by Pyongyang.
Last month, after the White House said Pyongyang was covertly supplying Russia with a “significant” number of artillery shells, North Korea said it had never had arms dealings with Russia and has no plans to do so.
The Russian and North Korean UN missions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The US accused Pyongyang and Moscow of contravening UN sanctions on North Korea and would share its information with the UN Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement.
Pyongyang has built ballistic missiles capable of striking almost anywhere on Earth, weapons experts said.
Kirby said Putin has increasingly turned to the Wagner Group for help in Ukraine, where Russian forces have stumbled.
The EU has imposed sanctions on the group, accusing it of clandestine operations on the Kremlin’s behalf.
Putin has said the group does not represent Russia, but that private military contractors have the right to work anywhere in the world as long as they do not break Russian law.
US President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday unveiled new curbs on technology exports to the Wagner Group. More sanctions are coming in the weeks ahead against the company and its support group in countries around the world, Kirby said.
Prigozhin is spending more than US$100 million per month to fund Wagner’s operations in Ukraine, but has encountered problems recruiting Russians to fight there, Kirby said.
The Wagner Group, staffed by veterans of the Russian armed forces, has fought in Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic and Mali, among other countries.
US intelligence indicates Wagner has played a major role in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and has suffered heavy casualties there with about 1,000 Wagner fighters killed in recent weeks, Kirby said.
Inside Russia, Prigozhin’s influence is expanding, and his group’s independence from the Russian Ministry of Defense “has only increased and elevated over the course of the 10 months of this war,” Kirby said, without providing evidence.
Kirby said that in some instances, Russian military officials in Ukraine were subordinate to Wagner forces.
Prigozhin has criticized Russian generals and defense officials for their performance since the invasion.
Separately, North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the sea off its east coast yesterday, the South Korean military and Japanese coast guard said.
The launch was the latest in an unprecedented number of missile tests by the North this year.
The isolated country fired two mid-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on Sunday, calling it an “important” test for its spy satellite program intended to be completed by April.
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