Pyongyang explicitly rebutted Zelenskyy’s recent claim that Russia wants North Korea to send it between 30,000 and 50,000 more soldiers
Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, serves as a senior official in the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. (KCNA/Yonhap)
On Wednesday, Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, described claims that North Korea may send more troops to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine as “groundless.”Kim addressed the claims on Wednesday evening in a statement published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency that sought to clarify her stance on “major international affairs.”“The theory of the ‘dispatch of additional troops’ of our army, which the Zelenskiy group invented and propagates, is an ungrounded farce,” Kim said, using an alternative spelling for the surname of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Kim’s comments explicitly rebut Zelenskyy’s recent claim that Russia wants North Korea to send between 30,000 and 50,000 more soldiers to fight Ukraine.Kim used the statement to defend Russia and slam the US. “The US and the West’s threat to the security of Russia,” she stated, “is the main factor that triggered the present Ukrainian crisis.”While referring to North Korea and Russia’s treaty that describes a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Kim asserted that cooperation between the two sides falls into the “legal domain of [the] exercise of sovereign right[s]” and noted that Pyongyang “remains boundlessly faithful” to “its duty as a contracting party of the inter-state treaty [with] Russia in conformity with [its] allied nature.”In regard to Japan’s “reweaponization,” Kim said that “our military leadership [has] already started [to reckon with] it as part of its military strategy to deter and contain the threat of Japan, which is evolving into a serious security challenge, or do something more beyond it.”“This means that if Japan tries to make a wrong choice, it will face [an] immediate annihilating blow [that will be] impossible to survive,” she added.By Jang Ye-ji, staff reporterPlease direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
