North Korea denies exporting weapons to Russia

…Is Russia actually losing this war, or is it just media propaganda?

September 22, 2022  1 min read

North Korea’s President Kim Jong-un

North Korea has denied providing weapons and ammunition to Russia.

The Defence Ministry in Pyongyang said this earlier in a statement issued on Wednesday that Washington and “hostile forces’’ had spread a rumour of arms dealings’’ aimed at tarnishing North Korea’s image.

“We have never exported weapons or ammunition to Russia before and we will not plan to export them,’’ a senior official at the ministry’s equipment bureau said in a statement published on Thursday by state news agency KCNA.

Earlier this month, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby spoke of millions of rockets and artillery shells that Moscow could potentially purchase from Pyongyang.

He though said that the U.S. had no evidence that any sales had actually taken place.

Military experts believe that the Russian military continues to suffer from severe supply shortages in Ukraine, probably as a result of sanctions and export controls.

Meanwhile, an assessment by British intelligence analysts last week said that Russia was “almost certainly increasingly sourcing weaponry’’ from fellow sanctioned nations such as Iran and North Korea.

Largely isolated North Korea has pledged its support for Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February, a move that has largely triggered outrage in the West.

Pyongyang is subject to tough international sanctions because of its nuclear weapons programme. 

Is Russia actually losing this war, or is it just media propaganda?

If we were to listen to the media by now Russia should be out of tanks, out of weapons and out of troops and on the retreat.

And we know what retreat means as Russian troops did abandon the drive toward Kyiv.

However, despite all the news of HIMARS hitting and destroying 50% of Russian weapons stock, we are still witnessing Russian troops slowly advancing in the Donbass.

Russia is not winning the war in the sense that large scale operation are now impossible. Thanks to Western weapons, large Russian vehicle and troops movements can be easily targeted and destroyed. At best Russian troops can achieve small scale victories but substantial advances are out of the question.

However, large areas of Ukraine are now under Russian occupation and it doe not look like Ukraine can deploy enough troops and heavy weapons to retake those territories. And this means that Ukraine is not winning the war either.

As the war progresses I getting increasingly concerned that Ukraine won’t be able to retake the lost ground and will only be able to make localised gains.

Retaking that amount of land would require several hundreds tanks, thousands of IFV and close to million troops to have a decisive numerical advantage.

I can’t see this war ending with Ukrainian tanks rolling in liberating the Donbass and Crimea.

I just can’t see that happening.