As North Korean troops head to Ukraine, our world is going to need powerful new peace narratives

By any measure, the news that North Korea is sending elite troops to Russia for training in advance of their deployment in Ukraine is chilling. On Thursday President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that his government has intelligence that some 10,000 soldiers were being prepared at a remote Russian base ahead of being integrated into Russian forces fighting in his country.

Mr Zelensky’s claim came just 24 hours after US deputy secretary of State Kurt Campbell had raised its own concerns about North Korea’s increasing military support for Russia. It is believed that earlier this year Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a mutual aid agreement on the supply of ammunition and missiles, and the US Department of the Treasury has claimed that Moscow has used more than 40 North Korean ballistic missiles in recent attacks on Ukraine – in a clear breach of UN Security Council resolutions.

In the increasingly close relationship between Mr Putin and Mr Kim, it is believed that Russia will be paying a significant figure for the incoming troops, which amongst other things will help fund North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. It is also assumed that giving its troops real combat experience will bolster North Korea’s security capabilities, though there is also a strong ironic possibility that heading to the more prosperous and far less oppressive West may encourage Mr Kim’s crack troops to surrender as quickly as possible rather than defend the ambitions of another country. Mr Kim may also find that, just as it has in Russia, the exposure of his general population to the horrors and realities of war and the details of life in the West could cause considerable unrest and internal domestic difficulties.

That aside, evidence is increasing that North Korea is now a fully active participant in the Ukraine war of occupation, as much as Mr Zelensky’s is clinging on to his country thanks to the active participation and military contributions of his Western allies.

Whilst it’s difficult to trust anything appearing online these days, reliable and verified evidence has emerged over the past 24 hours that North Korean troops are indeed being trained inside Russia, with a view to sending them into Ukraine within Russian fighting units. Earlier this month, South Korea’s defence minister Kim Young-hyun also said that it was “highly likely” that six North Korean officers had been killed in a Ukrainian missile strike near Donetsk on 3rd October.

In response to these latest developments the United States, South Korea and Japan have established a new joint team to monitor and strengthen arms sanctions on North Korea. For its part Russia has been doing all it can to strengthen ties with other potential allies, and in particular China which has its own strategic ambitions. China actually benefits quite directly from the Ukraine war as it has diverted US attention and resources away from the Asia-Pacific, where China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. The United States and other western allies have threatened severe responses if China tries to go into Taiwan.

A China-Taiwan war would carry many risks for both China and Russia, as a global catastrophe could well be triggered by a direct confrontation between two global superpowers. Nevertheless, the growing crises over Ukraine and Taiwan bring into sharp focus the chiling geopolitical ambitions of Russia and China – Europe for Russia, Asia-Pacific for China.

Almost 10 years ago to the day, Pope Francis gave a solemn warning that a “piecemeal” World War III had already started. Visiting Italy’s largest military cemetery at Redipuglia near Slovenia, where 100,187 Italian soldiers killed during the First World War are buried, 60,000 of them unnamed, the Pope paid tribute to the victims of all wars.

“Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep,” he said.

“Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction,” he said.

It’s a dire warning that Francis has repeated oftimes during his papacy. Just last month in an off-the-cuff remark during a speech to civic leaders in Belgium he said “We are close, almost, to a world war.

“Belgium is a reminder to all others that when nations disregard borders or breach treaties by employing the most varied and untenable excuses, and when they use weapons to replace actual law with the principle of “might is right”, then they open Pandora’s box, unleashing violent storms that batter the house, threatening to destroy it.”

As verified video footage emerged in Western media this morning of a long line North Korean troops being kitted out with Russian uniforms and equipment, you couldn’t help but wonder what terrors lie in store for these young men. Whatever their abilities and fighting skills, they are being marshalled into a theatre of mud, devastation and engrained combat that is already littered with the bodies of tens of thousands of other ebullient young men who discovered that war is not the brief glory shouted by generals, but the pointless, futile obliteration ever suffered by its combatants.

Ukraine is already a war of exhausting, relentless attrition like no other that has ever been fought, and in some respects it needs to be – some have even said, far better that it grinds on pointlessly than it spills over into a global Armageddon. More than a century on we have recreated Arras, Verdun, the Somme.

Whatever the circumstances that have led to a military conflict, we have to remember that all wars are human-constructed events, they do not happen by chance and, however desperate and seemingly unavoidable, they are certainly not likely to be acts of God – unless of course God’s morality turns out to have been somewhat different to ours. In most of the propositions to eliminate war, be they political or theological, the emphasis tends to fall on political leaders, and the vague hope that they might be willing to pursue global strategies that are co-operative rather than competitive.

This is not unreasonable given that the long view of civilisation is that species that work together tend survive far better than those that fight.

Unfortunately, modern civilisation has also somehow imprinted an incapacity to rationalise in the individuals and institutions that we have constructed to govern us. One only has to look at the vacant expressions and banal utterances of leaders on all sides ahead of wars to see that our present system of global governance has no meaningful solutions to the problem of resorting to warfare as a solution to human differences. It also hasn’t helped that many of those who have pleaded for an end to wars have tended to throw their pleas at the bloodiest generals and the most self-interested of dictators, rather than calling on those most affected to move to action.

As things stand, war is the easy option – someone else goes to fight, other peoples are demonised, leaders can breach international laws and – in the internet age in particular – the whole appalling process is being reduced to a perverse spectator entertainment, as we can see every day from the social media videos of weaponry attacks, many often depicting the killing of individual, recognisable individuals.

If there really is going to be any meaningful change in the use of warfare, the basic rules of conflict need to be changed fundamerntally. A good start point would be to insist that leaders who resort to war must be participants also; war should also humanise the enemy so that combatants understand the humanity they are slaughtering. It would also be helpful to establish a robust and effective international criminal court along the lines of Nuremberg, that could hold to account any elected leaders who prosecuted illegal or preventative wars. We also need new mechanisms that give voters far more control over the funding for war, and the ability to minimalise investments in arms industries.

Of course politicians will point out – and with some justification – that we need robust defence mechanisms because elsewhere in the world individuals are lurking with far less benevolent ambitions than ours. We should take some encouragement from the fact that for the first time in human history, the number of global democracies has passed the tally of authoritarian regimes but, before we start celebrating the victory of reason, it’s worth pointing out that the nature of dictatorship itself has changed.

In times past it was relatively easy to identify a potentially dangerous dictator, and the likelihood of armed conflict arising as a consequence. Such figures were also readily defined as enemies of democracy, whereas in today’s digitally-interconnected and commercially complex world, dictators – and the threat they pose to civic peace – are not nearly so easily identified and isolated. One only has to look at the complex web of relations and commercial inter-dependence between the UK and the likes of Russia and China to see that the avoidance of war is no easy objective for our political leaders.

Back in June of this year Pope Francis held a meeting with the Reunion of Aid Agencies for the Oriental Churches (ROACO), the Holy See’s humanitarian arm for the Oriental Churches in which he offered his insights on perhaps the only likely path to a stable global future.

Describing war as a “senseless and inconclusive venture” in which “no one emerges a winner; everyone ends up defeated” he made an impassioned plea for the voices of the victims of war to be heard.

“Let us listen to those who suffer its consequences, the victims and those who have lost everything. Let us hear the cry of the young, of ordinary individuals and peoples, who are weary of the rhetoric of war and the empty slogans that constantly put the blame on others, dividing the world into good and evil, weary of leaders who find it difficult to sit at a table, negotiate and find solutions”.

Looking at the smiling faces of the hapless North Korean young men donning their Russian uniforms it’s hard to imagine how any human individual might actually want to go to war; these circumstances – like the profitable weapons of war themselves – are manufactured by generals and legislators many miles away from the bloody consequences of their actions. Unfortunately though, we will never end wars by blaming it on these warmongers and faceless politicians – it is we who must demand of those who govern us that other ways are found to build a peaceful society, and to deal with those who would seek to disrupt what we have achieved.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian