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Yoon Suk-yeol, the presidential election candidate of South Korea's main opposition People Power Party (PPP), speaks during a news conference at the party's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea January 24, 2022.
South Korea considers sending weapons to Ukraine
Well, if North Korea is going to cozy up to Russia like that, South Korea isn’t going to just sit there, is it?
No, it’s not. Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Pyongyang on Wednesday, where he and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un celebrated their “fiery friendship” and inked a new strategic alliance, Seoul said it could start sending weapons directly to Kyiv to help Ukraine repel Russia.
That would mark a dramatic change from South Korea’s current policy of supporting US and EU sanctions against Russia while arming Ukraine only indirectly – by selling high-tech weaponry to Poland, which in turn has sent its own, Soviet-era equipment to Ukraine.
Kyiv, for its part, is keen to secure more firepower as Russia grinds its way deeper into Eastern Ukraine. These weapons “could have a meaningful impact on battlefield dynamics and potentially cause Moscow to reconsider the cost at which its burgeoning partnership with Pyongyang has come,” says Jeremy Chan, an East Asia expert at Eurasia Group.
Putin did not take kindly to the announcement, warning South Korea that arming Ukraine would be "a big mistake" and that Moscow "will... [make] decisions which are unlikely to please the current leadership of South Korea" if Seoul proceeds.
Meanwhile, Korean peninsula tensions are growing, as Seoul deepens its military coordination with the US and Japan, while Pyongyang has been testing more missiles and, of course, sending those gifts of garbage and excrement across the 38th parallel.
President Joe Biden speaks at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the US Capitol on May 7, 2024.
Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel faces its sternest test
President Joe Biden has what appears to be a political mission impossible: finding a thread that unites the pearls of Democrat support over the war in Gaza.
The Israeli military has started pushing into Rafah, despite US warnings against ground operations. That will exacerbate political strains at home for Biden as he tries to hold together his coalition of forceful progressives, who are critical of Israel, and steadfast moderates, who support the Jewish state.
Eurasia Group US Director Clayton Allen said the decision to delay delivery of some offensive weapons, specifically systems that would be utilized in an expanded offensive in Rafah, while at the same time leaning into his public statements of support for Israel, reinforced the untenable nature of the U.S. position.
“Trying to leverage Netanyahu into moderating his military plans, while publicly embracing him, is challenging at the best of times,” he said.
These are not the best of times.
Biden’s claim that his commitment to Israel is “ironclad” has pitted the White House
against the progressive wing of the party. That commitment has sounded less and less rigid as the death toll in Gaza has risen. A Gallup poll in March suggested 75% of Democrats disapprove of the Israeli military action in Gaza. Biden has become critical of Israeli mistakes but without tangible consequences.
In fact, a CNN interview on Wednesday showed Biden acknowledging that US weapons shipments had been used to kill civilians in Gaza, and the president explained that he would stop some shipments moving forward.
Still, Allen thinks overall aid is unlikely to be meaningfully curtailed, despite this week’s decision to delay the delivery of some systems. “Biden's strategy is to hope for a deal that doesn’t force him to follow through on the threats he’s making to make it happen,” he said.
Biden had hoped the threats would be enough to force an Israeli rethink on Rafah, but that has not happened. Still, “Biden doesn't want to follow through on it: He’s getting hammered by the GOP, most US voters support Israel, and long-term US-Israeli alignment is a key part of US strategy,” Allen added.
But if the “counter-terrorism” operation in Rafah turns into a fully-fledged assault, the pressure to act could become irresistible. When three-quarters of your supporters don’t back your position on a pivotal issue, it tends to sap party unity. Biden can ill afford that kind of rift as November’s election creeps ever closer.
FILE PHOTO: A view shows parts of an unidentified missile, which Ukrainian authorities believe to be made in North Korea and was used in a strike in Kharkiv earlier this week, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine January 6, 2024.
UN: North Korean missiles were used in Ukraine
The United Nations found evidence that Russia struck the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv with a North Korean Hwaseong-11 missile in January, according to a new report. The US and allies have accused North Korea of providing artillery shells to Russia, but this is the first concrete evidence that Pyongyang has sent more advanced weapons.
Not that the Hwaseong-11 is all that advanced. It’s a knock-off of the Soviet OTR-21, which debuted in the 1970s and has a range of under 200 miles. But it shows how little heed Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un pays to the sanctions the UN has levied against him for his ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.
Speaking of, Russia vetoed the annual renewal of UN sanctions monitors overseeing North Korea just last month for the first time in 15 years. We’re watching for more signs that Moscow is using its diplomatic heft to help out the Hermit Kingdom, as well as deepening relations between Pyongyang and Tehran, Russia’s other increasingly important ally.FILE PHOTO: Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy shakes hands with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as they attend a joint press conference, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada September 22, 2023.
Canada shows Kyiv the money
Defense officials say Ottawa will inject CA$30 million into a push to buy ammunition, working with Czechia, aka the Czech Republic, to get artillery shells into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers. Allies are being urged to step up since US funding lapsed – and in the wake of Ukraine’s withdrawal from Avdiivka amid heavy losses.
At the Munich Security Conference, as attendees absorbed news of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Denmark announced it would send all of its artillery to help the struggling Ukrainians and called on other countries to do more.
Republicans in the US Congress, under the influence of Donald Trump, meanwhile, have blocked aid, and rookie House Speaker Mike Johnsonhas failed to bring a Senate-passed $95-billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel up for a vote. Johnson is under threat from hardline Republicans who may try to oust him if he passes aid for Ukraine. But Democrats are considering taking steps to protect Johnson if he helps them get the package passed.
Unlike the US, Canada’s government has not wavered in its support for Ukraine, although the amounts of money are tiny in comparison. Defense Minister Bill Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Czechia but has not yet revealed any details.
Canada is also facing intense pressure to boost its defense spending. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenbergsaid Tuesday that Canada needs to set a date to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP, NATO’s guideline for members. Canada spent just 1.38% of GDP on defense in 2023. Meanwhile, only 11 of NATO’s 33 members met the 2% guideline last year, but several European countries have been increasing their spending sparked by fears of Russian aggression.
An AI-generated image of swarming drones.
Robots are coming to a battlefield near you
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything – from education, health care, and banking, to how we wage war. By simplifying military tasks, improving intelligence-gathering, and fine-tuning weapons accuracy — all of which could make wars less deadly – AI is redefining our concept of modern military might.
At its most basic level, militaries around the world are harnessing AI to train algorithms that can make their work faster and more effective. Today, it is used for image recognition, cyber warfare, strategic planning, logistics, bomb disposal, command and control, and more.
But there’s also plenty of debate over whether this could lead to killer robots and an apocalyptic endgame. Science fiction offers plenty of images of this – from Isaac Asimov’s rogue robots, the “Terminator” and Skynet, to Matthew Broderick racing to stop a supercomputer from unleashing nukes in “War Games.” Can we have less deadly wars without robots taking over the world?
Much of the concern about the future centers on lethal autonomous weapons, aka LAWs or killer robots, which are military tools that can target and engage in combat without human intervention. The weapons can be programmed to seek and destroy without a human steering them. LAWs could eventually become commonplace in war, and while critics have long campaigned to ban them and halt their development, militaries around the globe are exploring and testing this technology.
The US military, for example, is reportedly using an AI-powered quadcopter in operations, and early this year, the Air Force gave AI the controls of an F-16 for 17 hours.
During the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial this spring, the UK tested a collaborative swarm of drones, which were able to detect and track military targets. And the US has reportedly developed a “pilotless” XQ-58A Valkyrie drone it hopes will “become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.” While the AI will help identify the targets, humans will still need to sign off before they shoot – at least for now.
Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the potential uses of AI permeate all aspects of the military. AI can help the military “sift through huge amounts of information and pick out patterns,” he says, and this is already happening across the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
AI can also be used for advanced image recognition to aid military targeting. “For example, if the US has millions of hours of drone footage from the wars in the Middle East,” he says, “[they] can use that as training data for AI algorithms.”
AI can also help militaries plan hypersonic or ballistic missile trajectories — China reportedly used AI to develop a defensive system to detect such missiles.
There are innumerable other uses too, such as advancing cyber-espionage efforts and simplifying command-and-control decision-making, but the way militaries use AI is already garnering pushback and concern. Just last week, a group of 200 people working in AI signed an open letter condemning Israel’s use of “AI-driven technologies for warmaking, in which the aim is to make the loss of human life more efficient.”
World leaders like US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likewise concerned about the global adoption of AI-infused military tech, but that’s not slowing down their own efforts to gear up and gain a strategic advantage over one another.
•••
As the US ramps up its military capabilities, it is doing so as part of an AI arms race with China.
Last week, Biden and Xi met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, where they talked about artificial intelligence (among other things). The two world leaders “agreed to a dialogue to keep the [AI] from being deployed in ways that could destabilize global security.”
As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with their countries’ military ambitions and capabilities, Biden and Xi appear interested in keeping one another in check but are not in any rush to sign agreements that would prevent themselves from gaining a technological advantage over the other. “Both of these militaries want desperately to develop these technologies because they think it’s going to be the next revolution in military affairs,” Bresnick said. “Neither one is going to want to tie their hands.”
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and founder of Global Cyber Strategies, said he is concerned that AI could become the center of an arms race with no known endpoint.
“Thinking of it as a race …could potentially lead the US more toward an approach where AI systems are being built that really, as a democracy, it should not be building — or should be more cautious about building — but [they] are being built out of this fear that a foreign state might do what we do not,” Sherman said.
But with AI being a large suite of technologies, and one that’s evolving incredibly quickly, there’s no way to know where the race actually ends.
As AI plays an increasing role in the military destinies of both countries, Sherman says, there’s a risk of “the US and China constantly trying to one-up each other in the latest and greatest, and the most lethal technology just becomes more and more dangerous over time.”
Cartridges lie on the flags of Russia and North Korea.
North Korea keeps shipping, Russia keeps shooting
For 20 months now, Russia has been shelling Ukraine nonstop — sometimes as often as 80,000 times a day. But even as the war grinds into a deepening stalemate, Western intelligence officials say the Kremlin still has the firepower to keep pounding Ukraine at least through the end of next year.
Estonia’s top defense spook said earlier this week that Russia has at least 4 million artillery shells in its arsenal, enough to hit Ukraine at the current rate of 10,000-15,000 times daily until New Year’s Eve 2025.
A big part of that stockpile has come from North Korea, which reportedly ramped up military cooperation with Russia after a September summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Western intelligence services believe, based on satellite imagery, that Pyongyang has recently sent as many as 500,000 pieces of ammunition to Russia.
Last week, US President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve another $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, more than half of which would reportedly go to military support.File Photo: The South Korea and U.S. alliance fired eight combined surface-to-surface missiles ATACMS into the East Sea in response to North Korea multiple ballistic missile (SRBM) provocation from around 4:45 p.m on June 6, 2022.
Did the Ukrainians just use ATACMS?
Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Washington for months to provide its military with so-called Army Tactical Missile Systems, widely known as ATACMS, to hit important Russian targets deep behind enemy lines. It appears the US has now sent a small number of these missiles – and Ukraine claims that it used them on the battlefield on Tuesday to big effect. Its Special Operations Forces say they destroyed nine Russian helicopters, an air defense launcher, and an ammunition depot, with multiple Russian casualties.
Were the weapons they used the sought-after ATACMS? Ukraine isn’t saying, though President Volodymyr Zelensky dropped some not-so-subtle hints following the strike. “I thank those who are destroying at scale the logistics and bases of the occupiers of our land. We have results,” Zelensky said Tuesday. “I thank certain partners of ours: effective weapons, just as we agreed.”
Zelensky has every reason to talk up Ukrainian successes. The counteroffensive has so far fallen well short of the hopes and expectations of allies. The crisis in Israel has distracted the US and Europe and may require military resources that might have gone to Ukraine. Some hard-right Republicans in the US have called for a halt to US help for Kyiv.
It’s also likely that the missiles used in this case were an older version of ATACMS that lack the range of the more modern weapons Ukraine is still hoping for. Most targets inside Crimea, for example, remain out of reach for now.
But this attack reminds us that Washington remains Ukraine’s ally, Ukraine’s military remains a potent fighting force, and much still happens behind the scenes that we become aware of only when something large explodes.
Viktor Bout is escorted by Thai police as he arrives at a criminal court in Bangkok in 2010.
Meet the Merchant of Death
WNBA star Brittney Griner has now landed in the United States after Russia agreed to free her from a nine-year prison term for drug possession in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian citizen and notorious arms dealer known as the "Merchant of Death." Who is he, and why is he worth so much to Moscow that Vladimir Putin agreed to trade such a prized bargaining chip as Griner to get him back?
This dude is perhaps the GOAT of weapons traffickers — even inspiring a (not-so-good) Hollywood film. A Russian national born in Soviet-era Tajikistan, Bout cut his teeth selling old Antonov and Ilyushin airplanes, which offered a bumpy ride yet were perfect for dirt airstrips across conflict-ridden parts of Africa. He later branched out into weapons, becoming the go-to arms dealer for both tin-pot dictators and the rebel groups fighting them.
Couldn't pay in cash? No problem, he accepted blood diamonds. No paperwork? No worries, Bout forged end-user certificates for a fee. Al-Qaida? No way, although he once claimed he flew weapons to Afghanistan in the mid-’90s to fight the Taliban.
In his heyday in the mid-2000s, Bout was the world's top gun-runner. His web of supply routes sourced weapons and ammo from cash-hungry and corrupt former Soviet Bloc states and sent them to war-torn African nations like Angola, Liberia, or Sierra Leone.
Bout got busted in 2008 by American DEA agents masquerading as Colombian FARC buyers in a glitzy Bangkok hotel. Following a lengthy trial, two years later Thailand extradited him to the US, where in 2012 he got 25 years on multiple charges.
What has made Bout so valuable to Russia? His silence.
Since he’s been on US soil, the Merchant of Death has clammed up. Whatever the Feds have tried, he hasn't given them even a nugget of all of the valuable intel he gathered for years while building his global arms-trafficking empire.
Someone who likely had Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former warlord-turned-president, on speed dial probably knows way too much about who illegally bought and sold weapons around the world for more than two decades. And for Putin, ensuring that Bout keeps all that to himself forever is certainly worth one Griner.