This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 31st, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The movement of both North and South Korean soldiers into the conflict in Ukraine

introduces higher stakes and new risks for several countries involved, including the U.S.

Kators Doug Bandow explains.

When I pinged our colleague Eric Gomez about this fact that both North and South Korea would be committing humans to this fight in Ukraine, Eric said, this was not on my bingo card.

And it's, you know, it's a little strange to imagine, but can you set the scene a little bit in terms of how these

allegiances have come together?

What's happened is we, that is the United States in Europe, are fighting a very active proxy war against Russia.

And through all of our aid, especially weapons, we made it very difficult for the Russians

to defeat Ukraine, though they appear to be winning, slowly and painfully.

So Russia has looked for its own friends and allies. And what it saw with

North Korea originally was a lot of unused industrial production, particularly for artillery shells, which fit the artillery used by Russia.

So we've seen a much closer relationship between the Russia and North Korea. It appears now, and we don't

know exactly in what form that the North Koreans will have some forces on the

ground in Ukraine. Now this could simply be people

monitoring the use of North Korean weapons. That is to see how they're used, see

how they're performing. It could be... At that point It sounds like like a training event and in some ways that would match what the West is doing

The you know the US and Europeans have forces on the ground in Ukraine helping with the weapons that they have provided.

So this is not itself necessarily an escalation.

They could also be engineering perhaps or special forces with some, you know, back, kind of back country role involved not directly in combat, but perhaps supporting

Russian operations, logistics, that kind of thing.

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