US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin addressed reports that North Korea was preparing to enter the war in Ukraine with troops.

“If they are co-belligerents, if their intention is to participate in this war on behalf of Russia, that is a very, very serious problem,” Austin said.

Austin was returning from his fourth visit to kyiv, where he announced a $400 million U.S. arms package for Ukraine.

John Kirby, White House national security spokesman, said Washington believed at least 3,000 North Korean troops had arrived this month by sea in Vladivostok, Russia’s largest Pacific port.

“These soldiers then traveled to several Russian military training sites in eastern Russia, where they are currently undergoing training,” Kirby said Wednesday. “We do not yet know whether these soldiers will enter combat alongside the Russian army, but it is certainly a very worrying probability. »

He added that if they deployed to fight Ukraine, “that would be a good thing.”

North Korea is also accused of exporting ballistic missiles and artillery shells that have already exploded on Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, told The War Zone, a US media outlet, that 11,000 North Korean infantrymen were being trained in eastern Russia and were expected to be deployed to Ukraine.

“They will be ready on November 1,” he said, adding that the first batch of 2,600 would be sent to fight a Ukrainian counter-invasion in Kursk.

North Korean soldiers would use Russian weapons and ammunition, he said.

This figure is close to that given by the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) on October 18. Yonhap news agency said the NIS had learned that Pyongyang had recently decided to deploy four brigades totaling 12,000 troops to Ukraine.

This is also the figure put forward by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his speech on Tuesday evening: “We have information that two units of North Korean military personnel are being trained – potentially even two brigades of 6,000 people each. »

A week earlier, Zelensky told the Verkhovna Rada – kyiv’s parliament – ​​that in addition to fighting, North Koreans were also replacing Russian factory workers drafted to fight.

“The coalition of criminals with Putin’s state now includes North Korea,” he said.

The NIS said it monitored the first batch of 1,500 troops transported to Vladivostok aboard four landing ships between October 8 and 13.

They were stationed at Russian military bases located in the Russian port as well as Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk to the north. They would undergo training on Russian weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Russia may be trying to hide North Korea’s involvement with its troops.

According to the NIS, the North Koreans received fake ID cards from the republics of Yakutia and Buryatia “that resembled North Koreans. It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed on the battlefield. »

The NIS also estimated that North Korea sent 13,000 containers of artillery shells, anti-tank rockets and missiles. Ukrainian and US intelligence agencies have confirmed the presence of North Korean missile debris in Ukraine.

South Korea has in the past suggested it could move toward actively assisting Ukraine with offensive weapons if North Korea were drawn into war alongside Russia.

On Monday, Russia’s ambassador to Seoul sought to assure that Russian-North Korean cooperation “is not directed against the security interests of the Republic of Korea.”

If confirmed, the presence of North Koreans as combatants would seem to indicate that Russia is not as well-staffed as it claims. Russia is fighting this war with volunteers and contract troops, often from former Soviet republics, and has avoided using regular Russian recruits.

Last week, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, was quoted by the official TASS news agency as saying that the armed forces’ manning plan for the year was 78 percent fulfilled.

“Overall, this rate is pretty good,” Medvedev said.

But the numbers Russia needs to maintain the tempo of its offensive operations are staggering.

For example, over the past week, Ukraine has estimated more than 1,300 Russian casualties per day and claims more than 600,000 Russian casualties for the entire war.

Al Jazeera is unable to verify these claims, but Medvedev said the Russian military took on 190,000 fighters under contract in the first half of the year alone.

Russia also lost equipment at a reasonable rate.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Russia had lost at least 9,000 tanks, 18,000 armored fighting vehicles and 19,500 artillery systems as of mid-October.

Oryx, an independent and open source intelligence platform, confirmed the loss of 3,500 individual tanks and more than 7,300 armored vehicles of all kinds.

Lloyd Austin estimates that the war has cost Russia more than $200 billion so far.

Ukrainian National Guard spokesman Ruslan Muzychuk said Russian forces had increased their use of armored vehicles and tanks in recent days to take advantage of unseasonably dry weather ahead of the onset of winter.

Ukraine has seen a high rate of daily attacks in the eastern Donetsk region over the past week, with Russian forces particularly focusing on Kurakhove and Pokrovsk.

These are towns west of Avdiivka, which Russian forces captured in February and continued their advantage as Ukrainian forces struggled to establish a new defensive line. Russian forces formed a salient 40 km (25 miles) west of Avdiivka over the following months.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said it had “observed three battalion-sized mechanized assaults in western Donetsk Oblast in the last week alone – a notable increase in pace, as the ISW has only observed reports of Russian forces.” conduct four battalion-sized mechanized assaults in eastern Ukraine from late July to early October 2024.”

Ukraine responded with a vigorous defense that saw no new cities fall to Russian forces over the past week. In accordance with its policy this year, it attempted to bring the war to Russian territory with deep strikes.

Its security services and military intelligence said their drones struck the Sverdlov arms factory in the Nizhny Novgorod town of Dzerzhinsk, 900 km from Ukraine, on Sunday.

According to Western intelligence, it is one of Russia’s largest munitions factories, producing explosives, artillery shells, glide bombs, and anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.

The same day, Ukrainian drones struck the Lipetsk-2 air base, triggering secondary explosions.

On Friday evening, Ukraine struck the Kremniy El factory in Bryansk.

The director of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, said that it is one of the largest microelectronics factories in Russia, supplying chips and circuits for Iskander missiles, defense systems aerial Pantsir, drones, radars and electronic warfare systems.

This is the second major Ukrainian drone attack on Russian assets in 10 days. On October 9-10, Ukraine struck the Feodosia oil depot in occupied Crimea, a Shahed drone storage depot in Yeysk, and the Khanskaya airfield in Adygea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a diplomatic offensive on Tuesday and Wednesday by welcoming 36 world leaders to Kazan, in southwest Russia. His scheduled high-level meetings included South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Putin called Sino-Russian relations “a model of how interstate relations should be built in the modern world.”