South Korea on Friday called on Russia to halt its arms deal with North Korea following a White House announcement that North Korean ballistic missiles were used in Russian attacks against Ukraine. A senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul said on this day that by hauling arms from North Korea, Russia was “contradicting” the United Nations Security Council resolutions despite being a p...
Why is South Korea trying to stop Putin from hurting his own army?
If NK was smart in making the deal with Russia, they likely got technology transfer and/or embargoed supplies of things they aren’t good at making like electro-optics, guidance systems, raw titanium, oil, missile software, avionics, etc instead of just money. Money they can counterfeit or blackmail the west for, the rest are verboten via sanctions.
THATS what has South Korea’s jimmies rustled - the big list of potential trade items NK could get, that’d help NK be much more effective if the DMZ gets ‘kinetic’ again. At the very least NK gets battlefield feedback on the supplied hardware.
Mmm… yes and no.
Russia could totally supply those… but its own inventories of such components is small and shrinking due to the sanctions and export bans. Russia absolutely doesn’t have any to spare right now. If they’re actually giving NK that stuff, it’s basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Agreed, India got shafted on tank deliverables for the same reason- but hence technology transfer. And raw materials are always worthwhile commodities or precursors.