Russia’s war in Ukraine is fast becoming a proxy battlefield in a global conflict.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is fast becoming a proxy battlefield in a global conflict between the forces arrayed in support of the U.S.-led global order and the authoritarian despotisms that seek to overturn it.
Russia’s anti-American allies are increasingly invested in Moscow’s success amid its war of conquest. While the Kremlin insists that the introduction of Western forces into Ukraine would cross one of its many fluid “red lines,” no such prohibitions obtain when it comes to, say, the augmentation of its own forces by countries like North Korea.
On Friday, South Korean intelligence confirmed Ukrainian assessments that Pyongyang had dispatched thousands of its soldiers to support the Russian war effort. Up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers will be introduced into the conflict soon, augmenting the 1,500 special forces already on their way to the Ukrainian theater.
The DPRK’s direct participation in the conflict deepens its already significant involvement in Russia’s war. North Korea has reportedly provided Moscow with 1.5 million of the 3 million artillery shells Russia fires on Ukrainian positions on an average annually since this war began. Though that ordnance is of dubious quality, what it lacks in reliability, it makes up for in sheer volume.
According to the Associated Press, Pyongyang expects that Russia will repay the favor by providing the North Koreans with “high-tech weapons technology associated with its nuclear and missile programs, a move that will complicate U.S. and South Korean efforts to neutralize North Korea nuclear threats.”
For those in the West who question how this far-away war impacts America’s national security, Russia’s contributions to the sophistication of one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear arsenals in the possession of an entirely opaque and unpredictable regime as schizophrenic as the DPRK’s should clarify things.
North Korea is hardly the only rogue state committing materiel to Russia’s quest for territorial expansionism. The Islamic Republic of Iran provides Russia with short-range ballistic missiles and drones that rain down on Ukraine’s civilian population centers, and the Iranians are assisting Russian forces in establishing and maintaining their own drone production lines. For its compliance, reports indicate that Iran has received advanced Russian military technology — including advanced Russian Su-35 fighter jets, Mi-28 assault helicopters, and sophisticated S-400 missile-defense systems.
Likewise, the People’s Republic of China’s support for Russia’s war effort “comes from the very top,” according to congressional testimony delivered recently by deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell. Beijing provides Russia with what U.S. and E.U. officials describe as “ongoing support for Russia’s military and industrial base,” including “significant amounts of dual-use goods” that evade international sanctions regimes but nevertheless make their way onto “the battlefield against Ukraine.” Among them, components for the manufacture of missiles, drones, and tanks — materials that range from microelectronics to machine tools, radar to optical devices, sensors to telecommunications gear. “Moscow was reciprocating by sharing sensitive military technologies with Beijing, he added, including those related to submarine operations, stealth aircraft design and missile capabilities,” the South China Morning Post reports.
On the other side of the equation, Ukraine benefits from the (often halting) material support provided by upwards of 45 sovereign states, although only ten of those democratic countries have contributed the bulk of Ukraine’s foreign military aid. The U.S. and U.K., Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Canada, and Sweden, along with the E.U. broadly, are the primary sources of tangible lethal aid and financial support for Ukraine’s resistance. That NATO-centric amalgam betrays the degree to which the Western allies regard Russia’s war as a European conflict — a belief to which the global anti-American axis does not adhere.
The longer the war in Ukraine continues, the more it comes to resemble something approximating the Spanish Civil War — a proxy theater for the prosecution of the great ideological conflict of the first half of this century, which will determine whether the post-Cold War order hashed out by the world’s victorious market economies will endure. That’s how America’s enemies see it, at least.