WASHINGTON (Reuters) -North Korea's deployment to Russia to aid its war against Ukraine has the potential to lengthen the already 2-1/2-year old conflict and draw in additional actors, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
Some 10,000 North Korean forces were already deployed to eastern Russia, wearing Russian uniforms and carrying Russian equipment, Austin said, in what he added increasingly looked like a deployment to support Russia's combat operations in the Kursk region, near the border with Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion into Kursk in August and hold hundreds of square kilometers of territory there.
After talks with his South Korean counterpart at the Pentagon, Kim Yong-hyun, Austin called the deployment a "dangerous and destabilizing escalation."
"It does have the potential of lengthening the conflict or broadening the conflict," Austin told reporters, standing alongside Kim. "It could encourage others to take action, different kinds of action ... There are a number of things that could happen." If North Korea aids Russia's war, North Korean troops can expect to be targeted by Ukrainian troops using weapons provided by the United States and its allies, and some will likely die on the battlefield, Austin added.
"If they are fighting alongside of Russian soldiers, they are co-belligerents, and we have every reason to believe that ... they will be killed and wounded as a result of that," Austin said.
South Korea has warned that Pyongyang would learn valuable lessons from its troops engaging in combat and witnessing modern warfare by helping Russia, and that constituted a direct military threat to South Korea.
Speaking alongside Austin, Kim cautioned that North Korea, in exchange for the deployment, was likely to seek Russian technology on tactical nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"I believe this can result in the escalation of the security threats on the peninsula," Kim said, speaking through a translator.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jonathan LandayEditing by Chris Reese)
