Engineers said to be supporting missile launches and reports of North Koreans killed near Donetsk
North Korean military engineers have been deployed to help Russia target Ukraine with ballistic missiles, and North Koreans operating in occupied areas of Ukraine have already been killed, senior officials in Kyiv and Seoul said.
There are dozens of North Koreans behind Russian lines, in teams that “support launcher systems for KN-23 missiles”, a source in Ukraine told the Guardian.
Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, last year travelled to Russia for a summit with Vladimir Putin where the two men bolstered their deepening ties with a secret arms deal.
Pyongyang’s ammunition shipments were vital in allowing Russian forces to advance in a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine this summer. But it appears increasingly clear that the agreement went beyond supplying materiel.
We’ve had Russians, North Koreans, and Indians fighting in Ukraine with Chinese supplied weapons against Ukrainians armed with American, Polish, German, British, and other European weapons in a war that’s been going on for nearly two years.
Can we call it a World War yet?
Or are we just going to refuse to use the word until nukes are dropped?
We can also throw in the Middle Eastern theater for good measure too if that’s not enough.
Seems to me that it’s just part of the proxy war that the world powers have been fighting pretty much constantly in an Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia kind of way since 1945.
I’d say the situation is a lot closer to the Spanish Civil War, tbh. A lot of countries sent expeditionary forces and volunteers to assist one side or the other, including Russia and Nazi Germany (who kinda used the conflict as a proving ground for the concept of combined arms doctrine we know as “blitzkrieg”).
Syria was WW3’s Spanish civil war.
Not until there are NATO boots on the ground, or NATO recognizes it is at war. Russia is already saying it is, NATO just didn’t get the memo yet I guess.
You are right in saying Russia kinda made it a world war. I guess with just the one front it just doesn’t feel like it.
It could be pretty easily argued that Gaza/Lebanon is another front. Iran/Russia/China axis seems to be solidifying to an extent, imo.
Israel did just bomb a Russian airbase in Syria, after all.
Edit: guess I didn’t say “Israel is bad” enough in my comment? Seriously, I didn’t even make any value judgments in this comment, y’all are too touchy.
We didn’t call the cold war a world war and that wasn’t in a single country