South Korean defense chief says North Korea has supplied 7,000 containers of munitions to Russia
SEOUL, South Korea—North Korea has shipped around 7,000 containers filled with munitions and other military equipment to Russia since last year to help support its war in Ukraine, South Korea’s defense minister said Monday.
Shin Won-sik shared the assessment at a news conference hours after the South Korean and Japanese militaries said the North fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern waters, adding to a streak of weapons displays amid growing tensions with rivals.
Since the start of 2022, North Korea has used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a distraction to ramp up its weapons tests and has also aligned with Moscow over the conflict, as leader Kim Jong Un tries to break out of diplomatic isolation and join a united front against the United States.
U.S. and South Korean officials have accused North Korea of supplying Russia with artillery shells, missiles and other equipment in recent months to help fuel its war on Ukraine, saying that such arms transfers accelerated after a rare summit between Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin in September.
North Korea in exchange possibly received badly needed food and economic aid and military assistance aimed at upgrading Kim’s forces, according to South Korean officials and private experts. Both Moscow and Pyongyang have denied the existence of an arms deal between the countries.
During a news conference in Seoul, Shin said the South Korean military believes the North, after initially relying on ships, has been increasingly using its rail networks to send arms supplies to Russia through their land border.
In exchange for sending possibly several million artillery shells and other supplies, North Korea has received more than 9,000 Russian containers likely filled with aid, Shin said. He raised suspicions that Russia could be providing North Korea with fuel, possibly in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions that tightly cap the country’s imports of oil and petroleum products.
While fuel shortages likely forced North Korea to scale back winter training activities for its soldiers in recent years, South Korea’s military assesses that the North expanded such drills this January and February, Shin said.
North Korea’s latest missile launches came days after the end of the latest South Korean-U.S. combined military drills that the North portrays as an invasion rehearsal.
Shin said the North may dial up its testing activity before the April 10 parliamentary elections in South Korea, which is shaping up as a confidence vote for conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has taken a harder line than his liberal predecessor over North
Korean nuclear ambitions and threats.
Animosity between the war-divided Koreans has recently worsened, with both countries taking steps to breach a 2018 bilateral military agreement on reducing border tensions. Kim vowed in January to abandon the North’s long-standing goal of reconciliation and to rewrite its constitution to declare the South its most hostile adversary.
While most of North Korea’s recent missile tests seem aligned with its stated goals of augmenting its frontline forces with new weapons systems, the South Korean and U.S. militaries are also evaluating whether some North Korean tests are aimed at verifying the performance of weapons it intends to send to Russia, Shin said.
North Korean state media said Monday that Kim sent a message of congratulations to Putin over his reelection as Russia’s president. On Saturday, Kim’s sister issued a statement through state media saying that her brother has used a Russian luxury limousine recently gifted by Putin and praised the car’s “special function,” in another effort to boost the visibility of the countries’ bilateral ties.
A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Texas to begin enforcing a law that gives police broad powers to arrest migrants suspected of crossing the border illegally as a legal battle over the measure continues to play out.
The conservative majority’s order rejected an emergency application from the Biden administration, which says the law is a clear violation of federal authority that would cause chaos in immigration law.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott praised the order clearing the way for the law that allows any police officer in Texas to arrest migrants for illegal entry and authorizes judges to order them to leave the U.S.
The high court didn’t address whether the law is constitutional. The measure now goes back to an appellate court, which is expected to hear arguments Wednesday. It could be blocked again and may eventually return to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, it wasn’t clear how soon Texas might begin arresting migrants under the law.
It was also unclear where any migrants ordered to leave might go. The law calls for them to be sent to ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, even if they are not Mexican citizens.
But Mexico’s government said Tuesday it would not “under any circumstances” accept the return of any migrants to its territory from the state of Texas. Mexico is not required to accept deportations of anyone except Mexican citizens.
It condemned the Texas law being allowed to take effect, saying it would criminalize migrants and lead to the separation of families, discrimination and racial profiling. The Mexican government said it would put its position before the appeals court next considering the law.
The Department of Homeland Security said the federal government would also continue the court challenge to the law that will “further complicate” the job of its “already strained” workforce. The agency won’t assist in any efforts to enforce the law known as Senate Bill 4.
The Supreme Court’s majority did not write a detailed opinion in the case, as is typical in emergency appeals. But the decision to let the law go into effect drew dissents from liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
“The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos,” Sotomayor wrote in a blistering dissent joined by Jackson.
The law is considered by opponents to be the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since an Arizona law more than a decade ago, portions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court. Critics have also said the Texas law could lead to civil rights violations and racial profiling.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the law “harmful and unconstitutional” and said it would burden law enforcement while creating confusion. She called on congressional Republicans to settle the issue with a federal border security bill.
Texas, for its part, has argued it has a right to take action over what authorities have called an ongoing crisis at the southern border. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said in a statement it is “prepared to handle any influx” in the state’s detainee population associated with the state law.
Sheriffs’ offices have been preparing for the implementation of Senate Bill 4 since the state’s legislative session last year, said Skylor Hearn, executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas.
The law allows police in counties bordering Mexico to make arrests if they see someone crossing illegally, he said. It could also be enforced elsewhere in Texas if someone is arrested on suspicion of another violation and a fingerprint taken during jail booking links them to a suspected re-entry violation. It likely would not come into play during a routine traffic stop, he said.
“I don’t think you will see anything ultimately different,” Hearn said.
Arrests for illegal crossings along the southern border hit record highs in December but fell by half in January, a shift attributed to seasonal declines and heightened enforcement. The federal government has not yet released numbers for February.
Some Texas officials sounded a cautious note.
“A lot of the local police chiefs here, we don’t believe it will survive a constitutional challenge. … We have no training whatsoever to determine whether an individual is here in this country, legally,” said Sheriff Eddie Guerra of Hidalgo County. He serves as president of the Southwestern Border Sheriffs’ Coalition representing 31 border counties from Texas to California.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested her vote in favor of Texas stemmed from the technicalities of the appeals process rather than agreement with the state on the substance of the law.
“So far as I know, this Court has never reviewed the decision of a court of appeals to enter — or not enter — an administrative stay. I would not get into the business. When entered, an administrative stay is supposed to be a short-lived prelude to the main event: a ruling on the motion for a stay pending appeal,” she wrote in a concurring opinion joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The battle over the Texas immigration law is one of multiple legal disputes between Texas officials and the Biden administration over how far the state can go to patrol the Texas-Mexico border and prevent illegal border crossings.