Brussels and Seoul tighten anti-Pyongyang relations

Brussels – If North Korea aligns with Russia, the European Union will hold on to South Korea. In a web of international alliances and contrasts, the axis that has now been welded between Pyongyang and Moscow is also leading to a strengthening of ties between Brussels and Seoul, already important trading and soon-to-be military partners. The straw that is breaking the camel’s back is the now-confirmed presence of North Korean soldiers alongside Russian troops against the Kyiv army.

The chairwoman of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, heard South Korean head of State Yoon Sul Yeol on the phone on Monday (Oct. 28) to discuss progress on the security and defence partnership between the EU and the Republic of Korea announced in May 2023 and close to launch. The agreement, reads the European Commission’s website, “underscores the interconnected security nature of Europe and East Asia” and aims to strengthen “the joint commitment of the EU and the Republic of Korea to promote peace and stability in both regions.”

Metaphor aside, it means that Brussels and Seoul want to join efforts to deal with a political-military alliance that is worrying the entire West, inside and outside NATO: that between the Russian Federation and North Korea. For months now, international media and intelligence agencies halfway around the world have been highlighting how the dictatorship led by Kim Jong-un has been aiding the autocracy of Vladimir Putin in its war of aggression against Ukraine. First by supplying war materials (especially ballistic) and, recently, by sending soldiers.

The first reports that military personnel from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had joined Russian soil to be trained by Moscow’s army had come from Kyiv, which, around October 23, had reported the presence of North Korean soldiers in Kursk oblast, the Federation territory where the Ukrainians penetrated in August in a surprise raid. Then  Washington and Brussels also confirmed.

Today, Chairwoman von der Leyen denounced the provision of “more and more lethal assistance to Russia” by the DPRK, culminating in the fact that “for the first time North Korea’s soldiers are deployed in support of Russia’s war of aggression,” which “represents a significant escalation of the war against Ukraine and threatens global peace.” On the deployment of North Korean troops in Russia, the deputy director of the South Korean spy agency, Hong Jang-won, updated EU and NATO diplomats in Brussels: Seoul’s services estimate that the quota of 10 thousand combat-ready troops will have been reached by December.

The EU chief executive assured the South Korean president that the European response to such developments “will focus on cooperation with the Republic of Korea and other partners” in the region, such as Japan – with whom, too, Brussels is in the process of launching a security and defence partnership. After all, von der Leyen noted that the intensification of military cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang risks pushing the DPRK to “further increase tensions on the Korean peninsula” by threatening Seoul more closely. The situation in the area is already tense after, in mid-October, some road links between the two Koreas were literally blown up by the North Korean military.