A lack of manpower has been one of Ukraine’s greatest challenges in the ongoing war against Russia. Now, it’s starting to become a problem for Russia too — and both sides are scrambling to enlist new troops.
It is estimated that over one million people in both Russia and Ukraine have been killed or injured since Moscow started the war in 2022, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal in September. Ukraine has scrambled to bolster its manpower in recent months through heightened conscription and enlistment efforts. And while Russia has a considerably higher amount of fighters than Ukraine, it has started to look to North Korea — a key ally — for troops, raising questions over whether Moscow is becoming more desperate in its effort to topple its adversary.
“For Russia, in recent months, I think they’ve struggled to recruit enough men domestically or through their traditional forms of recruitment,” John Hardie, senior fellow on European affairs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “With the North Korean troops coming in, I think it does suggest Russia’s having a tougher time with recruitment and recruiting enough to replace losses and form new units. So they’re looking elsewhere, and in this case, to North Korea.”
Having already lost an estimated 350,000 troops in battle over the last two years — potentially even up to roughly 600,0000 — Russia has made policy changes and is offering better incentives in a bid to keep its military strong, including lowered recruitment standards and paying higher wages, according to the WSJ and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It has also involved several decrees from Moscow over the last two years to expand Russia’s armed forces.
Even so, Russia’s recruiting efforts are barely keeping pace with the rising combatant death toll, according to CSIS. Russia is bringing on approximately 30,000 new soldiers a month, but the monthly casualty toll is reportedly nearly the same number.
Desiring to expand its military without issuing a second mobilization order for Russian citizens, Moscow is turning to North Korea for help.
“This is an indication that he may be even in more trouble than most people realize. But, again, he went tin cupping early on to get additional weapons and materials from [North Korea and then from Iran,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters last week. “And now he’s making a move to get more people, if that is the case, if these troops are designed to be a part of the fight in Ukraine.”
Roughly ten thousand North Korean troops, including special operation forces, have thus far been deployed to Russia in recent weeks, according to available U.S. intelligence. Some of those troops have reportedly been seen near the Eastern front of the war facing Ukraine.
What the troops are doing in Russia — or why North Korea decided to send them there at all — remains a mystery. There’s a baseline level of risk in sending troops to the region, and it isn’t clear what North Korea is getting in return.
Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have addressed the matter publicly.
“I can’t make heads or tails of it, really… I think the Russians don’t have a whole lot of friends, and this would be a significant move to actually have North Koreans fighting and dying inside Russia, fighting Ukrainians,” Justin Logan, director of defense at foreign policy at the CATO Institute, told the DCNF. “To me, the bigger question is, what are the North Koreans up to — other than stirring the pot? And we don’t have a very good answer to that.”
The Pentagon is still assessing what the troops in question are present in Russia for, but spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters on Tuesday that they’ll likely be used for “combat against the Ukrainians or at least support combat operations against the Ukrainians in the Kursk region.” Kursk is a region of Western Russia that Ukrainian forces have overtaken in recent months; Russia is working to root them out.
Hardie noted that though Russia is now relying on North Korea for physical manpower, the number of deployed troops so far is relatively low.
“Reports say 10 to 12,000 troops which, just to put that in context, is well under probably half what Russia recruits and loses each month. So, you know, it’s not going to make a fundamental change to the war, but it could allow Russia to increase pressure in certain areas, or move troops from, say, the border region, to areas where Russia is attacking inside Ukraine,” Hardie told the DCNF. “It will be interesting to see exactly how these North Korean forces perform.”
Though it’s a historic first for North Korea to send troops to fight on behalf of Russia, it isn’t entirely unsurprising. The relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow has deepened significantly since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This has included intelligence sharing, security pacts, transfer of various weapons systems and now, troops.
“Meetings and comradely ties between us to be continued in the future will make a positive contribution to further consolidating the eternal foundation of the [North Korea]-Russia friendship,” North Korea leader Kim Jong Un told Russian President Vladimir Putin in an early October message, referring to the dictator as his “closest comrade.”
The problem of manpower extends to Ukraine in a far more concerning way, even as Kyiv desperately tries to enlist new troops. Ukraine has a much smaller population than Russia, and years of war have virtually destroyed some Ukrainian units, some of which haven’t been replaced.
A Ukrainian military official told the WSJ this week that the number of soldiers being trained had fallen from 35,000 a month in the spring to 20,000. Ukrainian media outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported in early October that there had been roughly 18,300 desertion cases since January this year, citing government statistics.
Low morale is starting to grip some troops as the conflict shows no signs of ending, according to CNN.
“They go to the positions once and if they survive, they never return. They either leave their positions, refuse to go into battle, or try to find a way to leave the army,” a Ukrainian battalion commander told CNN in September.
The effort to conscript troops has grown dramatically this year. Draft officers are being posted at various locations throughout Ukraine to stop civilians to see if they’re eligible for service. Officers who previously were only conducting checks in limited locations are now doing so in highly-populated areas and public places, including concert venues, grocery stores and restaurants, according to the WSJ.
That effort has been met with anger from some in Ukraine, as a number of people get into violent confrontations with officers over their refusal to enlist, according to recent reports. This sometimes results in forced mobilization or arrest.
Short of sending Western troops to Ukraine — which has been mused by some European nations but strongly rejected by the U.S. — Kyiv’s manpower problem will likely only get worse. And while Russia may be relying on its ally for help, it has a far bigger domestic military, with roughly 1.3 million troops in active personnel, according to the 2024 Global Firepower Index.
President Joe Biden and U.S. officials have tried to help Ukraine over the last two years — through tens of billions of dollars in military aid or offering a bridge to join the NATO alliance — but it has done little more than to provide Ukraine with temporary defenses. Russia has expended hundreds of thousands of troops to little success, although forces have seized some territory along the eastern front.
With only months left in office, Biden’s options to help Ukraine are running out. It’s highly unlikely he will be able to convince Congress for another large aid package.
“[Biden’s has] been a terrifically active foreign policy presidency, in the sense that there’s been a lot of fires burning in various regions of the world that the U.S. has ineffectually managed,” Logan previously told the DCNF. “And the next administration, whether it’s Harris or Trump, is going to have an awful lot of fires to put out.”
The Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. and the State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
