It is not known whether the rail shipment of Orlov Trotters – Russia’s most famous horse and a favorite of North Korea’s elite – was related to the suspected weapons shipment, but the delivery suggests strengthening ties between the two present states that would have wider implications. for Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific. The White House announced Wednesday that North Korea has secretly begun bolstering Russia with arms shipments to bolster dwindling stockpiles in its war against Ukraine. “Our information shows that the DPRK is covertly supplying Russia’s war in Ukraine with a significant number of artillery shells, while disguising the true destination of arms shipments by trying to make it look like they are being sent to countries in the Middle East or North Africa,” he said. John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council. He added that the shells “were not going to change the course of the war” and that the US was still monitoring to determine whether they had been missed.

Increased risk of civilian casualties

But military analysts have warned that North Korea’s older, unguided artillery will further increase the risk of civilian casualties. North Korean arms exports are banned under UN Security Council resolutions, and both Moscow and Pyongyang flatly denied the arms trade when the US made similar accusations in September. “We have never exported weapons or ammunition to Russia in the past, and we will not plan to export them,” an official from North Korea’s Defense Ministry’s General Armament Bureau told state media. Dr Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based lecturer in international relations at Troy University in Alabama, said while open-source analysts had found it difficult to verify the arms trade, the US had selectively released information about Russia before and after the invasion that had turned into . to be reliable. “I see no reason for the Biden administration to misrepresent if that wasn’t true,” he said. “I think they would only release this information if they had very high confidence in the validity of the intel analysis.”