The West is behind the curve, the defence analyst writes. Russia’s deployment of North Korean soldiers is just one facet of a conflict being fought on ever more fronts
Mark Galeotti
November 30, 2024
The Sunday Times
The Russo-Ukrainian war seems to be spreading. Along with the 10,000-12,000 North Koreans reportedly ready to engage with the Ukrainians, Moscow is now said to have recruited hundreds of Yemenis with the promise of generous salaries and citizenship. Meanwhile, South Korea is considering sending intelligence officers or special forces to observe Pyongyang’s men and perhaps help interrogate any prisoners or defectors.
This confluence of international troops on frozen Ukrainian soil has led some — such as General Valery Zaluzhny, formerly Ukraine’s commander-in-chief and now its ambassador to the UK — to suggest it is on the verge of becoming a world war.
It is not that, though. Instead, it is a case study of how, in a globalised age, wars inevitably globalise too. “The Russians understand this perfectly well,” a British army officer involved in supporting Kyiv complained, “but we are still compartmentalising too much.” The sooner the West takes this process of globalisation into proper account, he concluded, the better.
Guns for hire
Vladimir Putin is clearly desperate to avoid another mass mobilisation wave considering how unpopular and disruptive the first one in autumn 2022 turned out to be. At present, though, the effort to advance the front lines as far as possible before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January — in case he means to follow through on his plans to impose a ceasefire on the war — is leading to more casualties than ever: some 50,000 dead and wounded per month, while recruitment is at no more than 20,000-25,000.
Hence the renewed drive to attract foreign fighters. Moscow has long since been recruiting in countries such as India and Nepal, but along with the Yemenis and North Koreans, a growing number of soldiers from Africa and Latin America are also being reported within the Russian ranks.
Moscow’s campaign of espionage and sabotage in the West has also become a multinational venture, involving proxies ranging from criminals to ideological fellow travellers. Two men who pleaded guilty to spying for Russia last week at the Old Bailey, for example, were Bulgarians, allegedly working under the orders of an Austrian. The men who torched Ukrainian-owned warehouses in Leyton in March, by contrast, were local petty criminals, working simply for money.
At the same time, there are an estimated 20,000 foreign fighters in Ukraine’s International Legion, including British volunteer James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, recently captured by Russia. More quietly, British, US and other western special forces personnel are on the ground, essentially as advisers, trainers and observers.
It’s not just about soldiers, though. Iran sells the Russians drones and missiles, North Korea provides ammunition, and China has provided dual-use technologies such as all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and radios. Other countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Armenia appear to turn a blind eye to the smuggling into Russia of sanctioned goods, from spare parts to microchips.
Chain reactions
At the same time, Ukraine and its western allies also depend on global supply chains. In 2023, for example, South Korea sent the US 300,000 artillery shells, so the Americans could send their shells to Ukraine. This year, the Czechs have been leading an initiative to scour the world to buy 800,000 rounds from anyone willing to sell.
Even Argentina has been negotiating with Paris to return its five Dassault Super Étendard strike fighters, which can then be donated to Ukraine, in return for French drones or helicopters.
No wonder that both sides have been fighting a political and economic struggle around the world. The West has sought to extend its sanctions regime to isolate Moscow financially, and to stop sanctions-busting exports and imports of its oil. Often this has led to a backlash. One west African diplomat angrily damned the “western financial imperialism” that forced poor countries to choose between cheap Russian oil and the danger of being sanctioned.
Russia has not just been doing its best to bypass those sanctions and fan the flames of anti-western feeling in the global south, it has begun a wider campaign to try to meddle with western supply chains. These started with cyberattacks on European railways and this year have graduated to arson attacks (such as the one in Leyton, which may have been prompted by a belief that the warehouses were storing privately raised aid for the front) and incendiary devices on cargo aircraft.
The cause of last week’s fatal crash of a DHL cargo plane in Vilnius, Lithuania, is still unclear, but the German defence chief, Carsten Breuer, has suggested that it “fits somewhere into this pattern” of Russian sabotage.
Either way, a Pentagon logistics expert admits he is worried that the increased need to scan shipments for possible explosives and the impact of disruptive cyber and physical attacks may well make the whole process slower and more expensive. He cited an earlier operation in Vrbětice in the Czech Republic, when Unit 29155, Russian military intelligence’s infamous sabotage and assassination force, blew up a shipment of ammunition bound for Ukraine in 2014, causing huge damage at a warehouse. “A few Vrbětices could all but paralyse the supply chains,” he said.
Globalised war
Despite Zaluzhny’s recent claim that “the Third World War has begun”, though, this is not a world war, as we understand it. Wars are often multinational, drawing in both volunteers and other states. Some 18 countries were involved in the Korean War, for example, while the current conflict in Gaza and Lebanon sees US-backed Israel facing off against Hamas and Hezbollah and their Iranian, Russian, Syrian and Yemeni supporters.
Rather, this is the first major war of the globalised age, when everything connects to everything else, and all the participants (with the possible exception of the North Koreans) operate in single finance and information spaces.
Despite attempts by the West to block Russian channels such as RT, and Russian tit-for-tat bans on the BBC and similar outlets, thanks to VPNs (virtual private networks, which allow users to bypass controls) and mirroring sites that evade blocks, news and propaganda still flow both ways. Indeed, the audience for BBC Russian Service has grown since the start of the war.
Likewise, despite a massive range of western sanctions, Russia’s financial systems have not been fully isolated. Through amenable third-party banks, or via commodity swaps, or simply using criminal money laundries, it is still possible for Moscow to operate in the global financial system, even if at a price.
The Russians have inherited a much more holistic view of war from the Soviets. A hawkish Russian defence scholar described their approach to me as being “all about the outcomes, not the means. The Russian way of war is to think what you want to accomplish and use whatever that requires”, whether that means “armed force, subversion or non-military pressure”.
The Russian campaign of sabotage and subversion in Europe, for example, is a recognition that it would be militarily suicidal to challenge Nato directly. Instead it hopes to exacerbate divisions and sap the will to continue supporting Kyiv. This involves everything from cyberattacks and arson to alarming rhetoric about the risk of nuclear escalation, and the use of an experimental Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on November 21. Direct operations, disinformation, subversion and threat all combine in a co-ordinated way.
They are also operating more purposefully across different geographic theatres as well as domains of conflict. Backing an authoritarian regime in Africa, for example, is a win for Putin in the information war, allowing him to reassure his sceptical people that they have friends across the world. It is also an economic victory, opening markets to sanctions busting, and perhaps also permits the recruitment of soldiers to fight in Ukraine.
The West falls behind
To a degree, the Russians are having to operate in this way precisely because they are weaker in so many ways than the collective West. Either way, though, it is impossible to deny that, despite much talk about “multi-domain integration” and similar buzzwords, the West has yet really to come to terms with this in practice.
In a speech to the Nato cyberdefence conference at Lancaster House in London last week, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, said that the West’s contest with Russia “is
played out in two realms: the physical and the cyber”. If only it were just two realms. As a British military planner acknowledged: “We will always just be catching up, until we appreciate the breadth of the contest, the multiplicity of domains, and the interconnections between them. It’s not just cyber, it’s … what’s that film?”
It turned out that he meant the 2022 surrealist comedy, Everything Everywhere All at Once, about a battle waged across parallel universes. This is the essence of such a major modern war: it is fought in many different ways. As the Russians step up their missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid — last Thursday, almost three quarter of a million households faced power cuts, as temperatures hovered around zero — it is easy to focus on the physical war. But President Zelensky, calling for a “strong reaction from the world”, wants a greater recognition from the West of just how broad the Russian threat really is.
His most recent suggestion that he could envisage temporarily accepting Russian control over the territories it is occupying — so long as the rest of Ukraine is quickly accepted into Nato — suggests he is no more confident that the West can respond to this global challenge than he is that his own forces can drive the invaders back across the border.