10th Mountain Medics, Mr. Zelensky’s Nukes, North Korean Commandos

Politics and diplomacy, and along with it posturing in the media were probably the most important developments this week.

Which in its way is more proof – should anyone actually be looking for it – of the scale of this war and the ability of people, even a little distant from it, either to get used to all the killing and destruction, or just to ignore it.

As an aside, Thursday and Friday saw two of the biggest Russian kamikaze drone strikes against targets across Ukraine, for the entire war.

Over 150 Shaheds, Friday night with missiles as well. It appears the Ukrainians shot down or jammed almost all of them. Like millions of Ukrainians, if I’m honest, I slept through it.

10th Mountain Casualty Stabilization Point

I’ll kick this review off with a link to some video from a casualty stabilization point operated by 10th Mountain Brigade “Edelweiss.” Yes, Edelweiss. The flower grows in the Carpathians at high altitudes as well. It’s not just next to the Zugspitz and Berchesgarten.

The 10th is a tough unit with a strong combat record. They’re from the far west, out by Ivano-Frankivsk. I’ve actually seen them in the field. They really do have soldiers who are shepherds and foresters etc., but mostly they’re small-town guys.

Of course, it’s up to you if you want to read lederhosen, dirndls, red armbands and dumb mustaches into a post about 10th Mountain.

Other Topics of Interest

North Korean Deserters Fleeing Kursk May Be Pressed Into Fighting Ukrainian Forces, Intel Claims

The 18 North Korean soldiers who had fled from positions in the Kursk region were detained and relocated to participate in assault operations against Ukrainian troops, HUR reports.

I really can’t add to the video itself except to say it is one of the best pieces of combat journalism I have seen, by anyone, in a long time. Yes, I know the people who produced it aren’t “journalists.” Don’t care. Respect. Screen grab attached.

A final note for this section – this week saw some of the highest Russian day-by-day casualties of the entire war.

By and large, this is because of successful but bloody Russian short-distance attacks around Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk in the Donbas sector and in the Kursk sector, failed Russian attacks in the Zaporizhzhia sector, and successful and bloody-for-Russia Ukrainian attacks in the Kharkiv sector.

The main Ukrainian killers are still crowd-funded FPV drones, however, I’m seeing reports of a moderate increase of artillery ammunition for the Ukrainians and a distinct decrease in artillery ammunition for the Russians.

Zelensky Goes Nuclear

By far the most egghead-newsy development this week was Zelensky showing up in Brussels to flog his victory plan, and more specifically, a very clever aside he made about nuclear weapons, Ukraine, and the war.

What he did was basically say that if the NATO states cannot find a way to guarantee Ukraine’s security, and that basically means Ukraine joining NATO, then Ukraine, at minimum, is no longer under treaty obligations not to develop nuclear weapons. NOT that Ukraine plans to, you understand…

The specifics of what exactly he said you can read more about here.

This was a pretty big deal and a milestone, from the point of view of formal Ukrainian messaging, because for the entire war not once has anyone senior in the Zelensky administration gone public with a clear position on Ukrainian nuclear weapons capacity.

As a reminder, Ukraine not being a nuclear-armed country is directly related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, because in the early 1990s Ukraine gave away its nuclear weapons – to Russia – in exchange for a series of agreements that basically said all signees would respect Ukrainian sovereignty and borders, and support Ukraine if any nuclear power attacked Ukraine.

Most of you know this, but for the record, this is commonly referred to as the Budapest Memorandum.

Aside from Russia, which, obviously, is in gross violation of those commitments, signatories include the nuclear states US, Britain and France.

There was a lot of arm-twisting by all concerned on Kyiv, at the time, because of “fears” at the time of loose nukes.

In retrospect, perhaps the Kremlin was preparing the ground for an invasion.

It is worth making clear that the agreement does not, per se, commit signatories to defend Ukraine if Ukraine is attacked by a nuclear-armed state, or, at least, the language in the English version of the agreement says “support and consult closely.”

However – what with the US struggling to convince its allies that America really, honestly, ‘you can definitely trust us,’ for sure, keeps its word and its eye on the ball, and absolutely has its friends’ and alies’ backs (Suez, Vietnam, Afghanistan, I could go on) – the issue is not so much the wording of Budapest per se, but rather, how serious members of the nuclear club are in preventing nuclear proliferation, as opposed to being laughed at when they tell some other state that nukes aren’t for them.

One of the many problems that the Smart People in DC have is that, they can try and back burner the Russo-Ukrainian War as much as they want, but countries like Taiwan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Indonesia, etc. are watching US support (or the absence of it) to Ukraine like hawks.

This is not to mention the US’ traditional allies under the US nuclear umbrella – particularly Germany and Japan.

My assumptions always were (and continue to be) that the Zelensky administration, over the course of the present war so far, almost never have pointed this out in public, because they have been doing so in private, and have been fed pablum like: “America supports freedom” and “We think it would be unwise and unhelpful to bring up Budapest and nuclear weapons at this time,” and so forth.

So until Thursday it was a taboo subject.

Which served the Smart People in DC quite well – because as long as no one is talking about the Budapest Memorandum and nuclear deterrence by Ukraine in public – no one needs to discuss in public whether or not Washington widely understands international security, or is able and willing to lead the collective West. Or is worth the paper it makes its international commitments on.

Zelensky on Thursday broke that taboo in a pretty clever way by recounting at a press conference following meetings he had with EU leadership, a conversation he had with then-President Donald Trump.

During that conversation – and I think, knowing whom they were talking to, we can be positive the Ukrainians recorded it – Zelensky told Trump Ukraine really, really doesn’t want even to think about nuclear rearmament, so Ukraine is depending on the US and its allies for security and peace.

Per Zelensky’s account, Trump said that made sense.

For what it’s worth, here is my not-quite word-for-word translation of what Zelensky said.

The number of times I’ve quoted the man in these reviews is probably less than the fingers on my hand, but what he said about Ukraine’s agreement to give up its nuclear deterrent, because the civilized West asked Ukraine to, I think deserves a really clear, literate rendering in proper English.

So the translation is not absolutely exact, but I’m confident it renders Zelensky’s points more accurately than word-for-word:

“Which of these major nuclear powers has suffered? All of them? No. Only Ukraine has suffered. Who gave up nuclear weapons? All of the nuclear powers? No. Ukraine was the one who gave up its weapons. Who is in a war today? Ukraine. Either Ukraine can have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection, or we should have some sort of alliance.

Apart from NATO, today, we do not know any effective alliances that could protect us. NATO countries are not at war. People are all alive and well in NATO countries. And thank God for that. That is why we choose NATO for our protection. Not nuclear weapons.”

You could tell, the man had been waiting for years to say this in public.

Like most people living in Ukraine, I have plenty of issues with the way Zelensky is running the country and the war, and I’m here to tell you he has plenty of critics.

But – and get ready I’m mixing at least three metaphors here – this uncorking the nuclear taboo bottle and letting the Budapest genie out – was really smart on several levels.

– Exactly at the time the EU and NATO bigwigs are meeting for their last talks prior to the US elections, and so trying to get Ukraine assistance organized and public messaging about that assistance lined up for their own electorates, Zelensky throws out the word “nuclear.”

All those diplomats and all those delegations, now have to figure out a way to go back home and write reports mentioning not just what Zelensky said, but what policy needs to be. Bureaucracies HATE having to report on public airings of hard facts of bad policy. It might make voters mad. And then funding for the bureaucracy might fall. So unpleasant reality has to be mentioned in the report. Which also goes into the public domain, or to lawmakers, or into the hands of other agencies competing for funding, etc. etc.

This is what dominating someone else’s agenda looks like.

– So it’s basically impossible even for international media that ignores Russia, Ukraine and the war, and even more for media that likes to report Russia is awesome and winning, to ignore it. A potential nuclear exchange on NATO’s eastern frontier — never mind if it’s basically farcical even to think seriously – is such a compelling news story, that all of a sudden, once again, EU assistance to Ukraine was mainstream news for a couple of news cycles. Not earthquake-important, but useful.

– In Ukraine, Zelensky is often criticized for being too polite and undemanding of Western states that sit in peace and pretend their help is major assistance when objectively it isn’t, while next door Russia is murdering now tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

Zelensky said out loud what basically every Ukrainian who comes into contact with a Westerner secretly thinks, and that can’t hurt him the next time the election rolls around.

Also, you watch, now that Zelensky has used the N-word (that was humor) in diplomatic public discourse, others will follow, and once again, that messaging may irritate Smart People in DC, but it definitely helps Ukraine advance its case.

– In Russia, the best response they came up with was Putin saying: “We will take appropriate steps” if/when Ukraine tries to go nuclear, which even mainstream media in the West now is starting to realize is how Putin says he has no idea what to do. It’s not a peripheral for him. Can Ukraine get the Bomb? Maybe they’re already working on one. Maybe they already have one. The FSB probably is saying “Nah, it’s all Zelensky talking.” But the FSB also said Ukraine would collapse in three days. What’s the right policy for Russia? Maybe Ukraine has a nuclear red line?

Say what you like about Zelensky, this is textbook strategic ambiguity used in nuclear deterrence, by a national leader almost certainly who doesn’t even have nuclear weapons.

A speculative write-up on East European nuclear deterrence strategy, how Budapest may have unbalanced it, and how close Ukraine is, or is not to the Bomb is here, but be warned, no one really knows and you can find experts that disagree.

The North Koreans are Coming!

Most of you will have seen the reports that there are 10-12,000 North Korean commandos en route maybe for the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the scare story manufacturers pretty much have been in overdrive all week.

So, before dissection and analysis, I suggest all and sundry go to the ultimate source of that information, South Korea’s National Intelligence Agency.

They put out a report (called a press release) that triggered the cascade of North Korea-in-Ukraine-maybe-yes-maybe-no content, pretty much all over Planet Earth except in despotic or destitute places that have neither literacy nor reliable internet, and of course in the mainstream United States, because who cares about that, it’s foreigners.

The first thing that struck me, as a guy who has to read materials more or less like this all the time – but they’re from outlets like the Pentagon, HUR, Rheinmetall, Estonian Military Intelligence – was how much South Korea’s national spy agency seemed to think its readers were actual adults capable of reading for more than three minutes and digesting reasonably sophisticated information, and who could be trusted to make judgments of their own.

I don’t read Korean, but even auto-translated, it’s obvious whoever in Seoul put this report together wasn’t (at least obviously) skewing information so the decision-maker could score some political points, or so that the content itself could get maximum hits. If anyone out there reads Korean and would like to take a look at that report and let me know if I lost something in translation, I’ll be glad for the input.

My view, having looked at the material – first, OK I’m convinced it’s not just a propaganda exercise by the North Koreans, it’s a real military assistance commitment.

So it’s easy to decide what the important, bottom-line takeaway of this is: It’s a giant escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War. It’s the first armed intervention by another state in the war, and it is another nail in the coffin of the proposition – many would already say “fiction” – that Western deterrence and cooperation strategy is effective.

As an aside, this is not just the intervention of a third state on the ground in Ukraine (well, they appear not to be there in strength yet, but the point remains the same), this is a nuclear-armed state intervening, in a war the pro-containment/escalation management crowd have been saying must be kept limited.

As for those Smart People, particularly in DC and Brussels, who are all about containing the Russo-Ukrainian War and “managing escalation,” well, if life were fair they would face consequences for pursuing a failed strategy. The war just escalated. At a minimum, it is just a statement of the facts that two authoritarian states were not deterred.

If you see no reaction by the West, see the part about Putin above. And the part about bureaucratic CYA. They don’t know what to do. It seems pretty likely they were surprised and this caught them flat-footed.

A midrange judgment might well be: we are either seeing the limits of China’s influence over North Korea, or less possibly, a Chinese decision Russia must at minimum be seen to succeed, and those successes must be accepted by the West, in its invasion of Ukraine.

I’m inclined towards the North Korean “Loose Cannon” theory, but again I’m glad for input from someone who watches those things closely, because I don’t.

Operationally, OK, if we believe these really are North Korean “commandoes,” then if they actually do wind up in combat against a Ukrainian unit, they might well do some damage, because my expectation would be that those soldiers’ fieldcraft skills, and ability simply to be miserable and continue the mission, would be far superior to pretty much 99 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian units in the field. Deployed intelligently and used for infiltration and surprise ground assaults, these are troops the Russians can use.

However, I am very, very skeptical that a Russian army command demonstrably incapable of running complex assaults with all but a few well-connected units with political pull – by which I mean some of the airborne and most of the spetsnaz – would find any other use for the North Koreans but to send them in ground assaults like they send the overwhelming majority of Russian units.

So tactically, my expectation would be that the Russian mid-level commanders would have a big incentive to stick North Koreans in exposed positions to absorb drone strikes and artillery fire, because no matter how well trained these North Koreans are, they’re not Russians and they don’t speak Russian.

Once under fire, my expectation is – here are uninformed, well-propagandized troops in a very foreign environment without a good understanding of where one might run – so that would argue towards troops like these holding positions until killed.

But lack of combat experience produces unpredictable results, and what’s more, service on a sometimes hot- but usually just tense-ceasefire line is nothing like a full-on conventional battle with drones, mortars and artillery. They’re human, you might see some of them do stupid stuff like running around during a mortar strike because you never really know who is going to panic.

However, I am as near to positive as one can be in these things – that if a North Korean unit steps out in the open in a sector where there’s a reasonable Ukrainian defense set in and a competent drone outfit behind it – their field skills and tae kwan do training will count for little, and there will be a slaughter.

I was recently chatting with some Ukrainian soldiers I had spent a little time with in summer 2022, and very quickly the conversation turned to stuff we did back then at or near the front lines, that would be suicidal today. We agreed we needed some luck to learn what is dangerous.

Also, as it happens, I’ve been reading on how the US Army is attempting to tweak doctrine to fight under enemy drone presence. They clearly are trying.

But, from what I read, the Army is still married to the ideas that heavy weapons’ dominance wins the ground battle, and that drones are something you mitigate so warfighting can get back to normal.

My opinion – and not just mine, this is the prevailing view among the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) better units – is that that’s so wrong, that commanders who believe it are effectively negligent. The view in the AFU is, the side that has more FPV drones and that uses them more effectively, wins.

That can be debated, but my guess is, the North Korean soldiers, if they reach a Ukrainian battlefield, will be orders of magnitude less aware of how lethal the drone threat is. Even if the Russians tell them. Even with their discipline, it’s hard to believe they won’t get spotted from the air over and over.

I guess it’s possible the North Koreans will succeed where probably every Russian and Ukrainian unit sent to the line took casualties and blew missions until they figured out the drone threat – and some never learned. But it would be almost crazy to expect it.

To be clear, I’m not saying the AFU is Leonidis and the 300, and that a Ukrainian drone section will kill anything bigger than a beetle, that moves. But my impression is, these are soldiers with zero combat experience, trained to fight a war with pretty much zero drones, and they are very unlikely to have their own drones and their own jammers.

If these commandos buy into their own unit esprit, and decide that the first casualties are just a one-off, and that since they are super-duper commandos, the way to deal with the Ukrainian drones is just to camouflage better and use better field craft, get up earlier, and move in the dark night more, do more push-ups and do without a hot breakfast, and so on – they may find out that the side that’s been fighting for years, and learning how to kill on the modern battlefield, actually owns the night.

Reprinted from Stefan Korshak’s personal blog. Please find the original here.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.