Washington — As North Korean troops prepare to join Russian forces in the war on Ukraine, Kyiv is stepping up a psychological warfare campaign to target the North Korean soldiers, a high-ranking Ukraine official said.
The effort is liable to get a boost from a team of South Korean military observers that Seoul’s defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, said this week will be going to Ukraine to watch and analyze the North Korean troops on the battlefield.
Last week, the Ukrainian military intelligence service-run project “I Want to Live” released a Korean-language video message on YouTube and X. The project also posted a Korean-language text message on Telegram.
The messages urged North Korean soldiers to surrender, arguing that they do not have to “meaninglessly die on the land of another country.” It also offered to provide food, shelters and medical services.
Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the Center for Combating Disinformation under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told VOA Ukrainian on Wednesday that “in the future, additional videos featuring North Koreans will be published.”
“The North Koreans will undergo training in modern warfare and then be used in actual combat,” Kovalenko said. “We (the Center for Combating Disinformation) are actively involved in identifying the individuals who have arrived and the units they are joining, as well as gathering evidence of their presence in Russia, their likely participation in combat against the Ukrainian army, and their presence in temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine.”
Influence campaign
Ukraine has been running similar psychological operations toward the Russian soldiers since the beginning of the Russian invasion, U.S. experts said.
“Ukraine has been doing that with the Russians early on in the war,” Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, told VOA Korean on the phone Thursday. “They got a lot of Russians to defect, and I suspect they will try to do the same things with the North Koreans.”
Bennett added that drones can also be used for sending messages in leaflets and in audio form to North Korean soldiers in the war zone.
David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel who served on the Combined Forces Command of the U.S and South Korea, said this could be “a great opportunity” to learn how to employ psychological tactics on North Korean forces in the time of war.
“Bombing and gunfire doesn’t happen 24/7,” he told VOA Korean by phone on Wednesday. “Military operations are also characterized by large amounts of boredom and inactivity, where soldiers are waiting for something to happen, and this is the time when loudspeakers and leaflets can really have an effect, because those messages give them something to think about.”
Earlier this week, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed in a phone call “to intensify the intelligence and expertise exchange” and “to develop an action strategy and a list of countermeasures,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian presidential office.
Some experts in South Korea said the team of South Korean military observers headed to Ukraine will likely include psychological warfare strategists who can offer advice to the Ukrainian officials.
Cho Han-bum, a senior research fellow at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification, said psychological warfare could be a real threat to the North Korean army.
“In the case of North Korean soldiers, they now have been mobilized for a war without any justification,” he told VOA Korean by phone on Tuesday. “It is hardly likely that they have a strong will or high morale.”
South Korea’s role
Cho said the South Korean government can help Ukraine develop psychological tactics against North Korean soldiers, since the country “has the know-how of a long-term psychological war with North Korea.”
Ban Kil-joo is a senior research professor at Korea University’s Ilmin International Relations Institute. He told VOA Korean in a phone interview Tuesday that psychological warfare could help weaken the military cohesiveness between Russia and North Korea.
“The Ukrainians don’t know much about North Korea, don’t understand the North Korean culture, as we do,” Ban said. “We can provide indirect support in a more social sense, rather than military or operational support.”
Ban added that it is important for the South Korean team to be “well-integrated with the Ukrainian forces through its supporting role,” to achieve the desired political and operational effect of a psychological campaign.
Other experts, however, are not convinced that psychological warfare will be effective to persuade North Korean soldiers to surrender.
Mykola Polishchuk, a Ukrainian author who wrote the book Northern Korea in Simple Words, said Ukraine’s counterpropaganda will not work with North Korean soldiers.
“As for North Koreans, they are not particularly politicized,” Polishchuk told VOA Ukrainian. “These individuals have little interest in politics.”
Robert Rapson, a former charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 2018 to 2021, told VOA Korean that South Korea should carefully make a decision about whether to be engaged in Ukraine’s psychological warfare.
“If the ROK [Republic of Korea] does decide to deploy technical personnel to Ukraine to solely monitor and help advise the Ukraine military on matters related to North Korean troops deployed to the region, they would need to ensure they do not acquire, inadvertently or otherwise, status as combatants,” he said. “There are, of course, clear risks to ROK personnel whether they’re combatants or not.”
Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has deepened military ties with North Korea. North Korea has exported dozens of ballistic missiles and more than 18,000 containers of munitions and munitions-related material to Russia since the invasion, according to the U.S. State Department.
In June, the two countries signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement mandating immediate military assistance if either of them is attacked by a third country.
VOA Korean’s Kim Hyungjin contributed to this report.
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