North Korean elite Storm Corps reduced to cannon fodder: sources

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 soldiers will be quickly wiped out.

Kim last month deployed roughly 12,000 elite North Korean soldiers to the Russia-Ukraine battlefield — known as the meat grinder because of the high number of casualties, especially on the Russian side — and sources say he has been paid $2,000 a month per soldier.

That is a huge amount for the hermit country where food is scarce and many of the 26 million people die of hunger. according to a 2023 BBC report.

However, Russian generals are not maximizing the use of so-called crack “Storm Corps,” North Korean experts told The Post.

Language barriers, culture conflicts and decisions as apparently disguised North Korean soldiers that it appears Russian fighters from Siberia contributed to what at least one American official said was a disaster “significant” number of North Korean casualties to date.

Instead of deploying the North Koreans in their own units, Russian commanders are reportedly mixing them with Russian squadrons – with disastrous results. In one case, this led to a confused Russian unit abandoning North Koreans assigned to them on the battlefield unaware of who they were.

“They’re being wasted,” says Asian expert Gordon Chang, author of ‘Plan Red: China’s project to destroy America’ told The Post.

“These are crazy things. They’re too good to use as cannon fodder, but that’s what happens. It’s baffling how they are used. If they were kept in their own self-contained units, they could be absolutely lethal in the fight against the Ukrainians. But that doesn’t happen.”

The ‘Storm Corps’ – or special forces – are considered the ‘best trained’ and, more importantly in a starving country, the ‘best fed’ of the entire North Korean military.

However, the quality of that food remains questionable. This was reported by the German tabloid Bild that as part of the North Korean troop deployment, Russian soldiers are seen in several 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 a brownish, short coat. This Spitz breed is a popular food dog in Korea. The back reads: “Product exclusive to the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

It is a mystery why Kim, 40, would want to sacrifice some of the elite troops. The official name for 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,” said Sean King, an Asia specialist with Park Strategies told The Post. As a dictator, “he doesn’t have to worry about re-election. Hundreds of thousands have died in North Korean labor camps.”

Ukrainian soldiers fought North Korean troops along the Russian border on November 4, the first skirmish since the foreign fighters were deployed to aid 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 an estimated eight million artillery shells and dozens of modern short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for Putin’s war effort.

“It is still unclear how the troops will be deployed, but they will likely be used mainly for combat,” he said Bruce Klingner a former veteran of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, now at the Heritage Foundation.

“Given that Russia is taking a World War I ‘meat grinder’ approach to trench warfare and there isn’t much of an integrated command structure, it won’t be easy for them,” added Klinger, who represents North and South Korea studied for 31 years. years.

“Messages have already been intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence that the Russians don’t know what to do with it. There is also some question about how good their training is. They may be special forces, but it is a mistake to consider them in the same class as, say, the Navy Seals.”

The North Korean soldiers, who are mostly in their late teens and early twenties, have never been out of the highly controlled Hermit Kingdom, where most citizens have no internet access and are deprived of many basic freedoms taken for granted elsewhere.

Few North Korean scholars believe a recent report from Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, who wrote of have had internet. As a result, they indulge in pornography.”

Bruce E. Bechtol Jr., a professor of political science at Angelo State University in Texas, who has written numerous books on North Korea, said he doubted the troops would even have 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 is tightly controlled,” Bechtol told The Post. “And remember that of the 12,000 troops sent to Russia, 500 military officers and three generals went with them. They have a lot of supervision.

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

Greg Scarlatoiupresident and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said he thinks the porn story is a “psyops from the Ukrainian side.”

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

North Korea is infamous “three generations punishment” The rule that three generations of one’s family must be punished for their sins by sending them to a gulag prison camp still plays a major role in North Korea.

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

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

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

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

North Korea’s military advisers helped train a wing of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe’s fearsome Fifth Brigade in the early 1980s. That led to the Fifth Brigade Massacre 20,000 people in Mateland in 1983.

North Korean pilots flew against the US in North Vietnam in the 1960s and have provided military support to Egypt and Syria against Israel.

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

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

“The first clashes with North Korean soldiers mark a new chapter of global instability,” Zelensky said. “Together with the world, we must do everything we can to ensure that this Russian move toward expanding the war – this real escalation – becomes a loss.”

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

Although described as inexperienced 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 long for their hometown in North Korea, no matter how tough those cities may be.”