Korean Drone Provocation Tied to Russo-Ukraine War

Tension escalates again along the DMZ

By: Andy Wong Ming Jun

Korean Peninsula tension is reaching new highs with back-to-back flashpoint news over the past week between the two nations. The first incident of North Korea reporting alleged South Korean drone overflights over its capital city Pyongyang, later backed by the alleged discovery of one such crashed drone’s remains, was swiftly followed by South Korean intelligence delivering its most concrete warning yet of North Korean troops being sent to fight alongside Russian forces in its ongoing war against Ukraine, and facial recognition evidence of a North Korean missile engineer attending a Russian missile launch on the Eastern Ukraine frontline.

South Korea has since indicated that it might revise its current policy of not providing direct military aid to Ukraine should North Korean troops continue to be sent to fight on behalf of Russia there. All signs indicate that the long-simmering frozen conflict on the peninsula is increasingly being influenced by the Russo-Ukraine War half a world away in Eastern Europe as a fresh proxy theater threatening to further destabilize the security balance in Northeast Asia.

The influence of the Russian-Ukrainian War on the political and military dynamics of the peninsula has long predated recent events. While South Korea under the current Yoon administration officially has a policy in place banning the direct provision of homegrown lethal weapons to warring nations abroad, since 2023 the US has tapped South Korean ammunition factories to produce 300,000 155-millimeter artillery shells which have either been directly donated to Ukraine afterwards or been used to replenish NATO artillery ammunition stocks depleted from keeping Ukraine’s burgeoning batteries of Western-donated tube artillery firing against Russian targets.

Direct South Korean military aid to Ukraine has thus far been restricted to non-lethal items such as military trucks, mine-clearing equipment and protective body armor. Such a policy has been in place ostensibly to deny any overt casus belli for Russia to provide North Korea with military technology assistance, an outcome which has nevertheless occurred in the face of South Korean restraint.

At the same time, Russia has been actively seeking similar ammunition replenishment from North Korea to keep its tube and rocket artillery crucial to its strategy firing, with 70 shipments of munitions including missiles, anti-tank rockets, and most significantly some 8 million artillery shells of Russian 152 and 122-millimeter calibers estimated to have been sent since August 2023 to the present. It is strongly suspected that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has chosen to embark on a cynical and opportunistic strategy of leveraging on Russian desperation for artillery ammunition and potentially even armed manpower to turbocharge North Korea’s military modernization in the face of the ever-widening military technological gap against South Korea and the US. At the relatively cheap cost of supplying rocket and artillery shells which has a huge quantity in surplus even if questionable in quality, North Korea in return receives not only much-needed food aid from Russia but more significantly military technological transfers as well as Russian political patronage at the UN.

The immediate reactions from both North and South Korea towards the latest accusations of South Korean drone overflights over Pyongyang can however be described as kabuki theatre. According to a well-placed source within South Korea’s defense establishment who spoke to Asia Sentinel on condition of anonymity, the two general South Korean responses have been skeptical towards North Korea’s accusations, yet there is also uncertainty about whether there is a potential South Korean renegade element or external agent provocateur seeking to escalate North-South tensions with a false-flag drone overflight using drones of South Korean manufacture origin.

According to this source, neither North nor South Korea has much to gain from either presenting full incontrovertible evidence proving that the drone was indeed built and operated by the South Korean government or military-sanctioned elements, or even giving any clear signals of denying or accepting full responsibility for the claimed drone overflights. Indeed, while North Korea has loudly protested these “South Korean” drones flying over its capital city, it has been silent on where it suspects the drones flew from. With the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea along the 38^th Parallel one of the most closely-monitored areas of the world, it is highly unlikely that such drone overflights would have happened unnoticed by either side, especially when North Korea has detected balloon propaganda leaflet overflights across this area in the past.

Although North Korea has publicly accused a South Korean company called “Sungwoo Engineering” of having manufactured the drones, based on the few public photos of one such drone’s crashed remains which bear superficial similarity to the company’s “SD-BAT” model, it has not produced any pictures of any drone components that bear the company’s identification numbers or markings. For its part, Sungwoo has kept silent, choosing to neither confirm nor deny the provenance of the drones. According to the anonymous source, while such drones are not easily bought or operated by amateurs due to their size and price tag, it is still entirely possible for them to be bought by private individuals or entities without needing official South Korean government sanction before being flown across North Korea’s northern border with China or even from the South via a coastal sea route over the Yellow Sea and then doglegging it over Pyongyang.

Regardless, North Korea’s loud protestation about the overflights doesn’t portray a position of strength for Kim Jong Un. In effect, Kim has admitted that his air defense network is able to be compromised without detection. And while there are some in the South Korean government and military establishment who are more than happy to indulge in a little schadenfreude over this drone incident, there are others who believe it is merely a North Korean false-flag operation used to invent a justification for expanded North Korean military support towards Russia’s war against Ukraine.