The official condemnation by Ukraine's allies took three weeks to come. On Friday, November 8, the North Atlantic Council, NATO's political decision-making body, "strongly condemned" the now-proven involvement of North Korean soldiers on Russia's side in the Russian region of Kursk, which has been partly occupied by Ukraine since this summer.

"The thousands of combat troops deployed by the DPRK constitutes a dangerous expansion of its ongoing support for Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine," denounced the alliance. As an exception, the statement was also signed by its partners in Asia and Oceania, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, as well as by Ukraine.

This collective condemnation came two days after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had published an unusually dramatic op-ed on the news website Politico on Wednesday. "The presence of North Korean troops in Europe marks a turning point ... are we on the verge of something far darker than the devastation that's already been visited upon the people of Ukraine?" asked the alliance's new representative, who took office on October 1.

Despite the unprecedented escalation represented by the deployment of North Korean soldiers, no retaliatory measures have yet been taken publicly by the allies. This has led Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to repeatedly express his annoyance. "The reaction that is there today is nothing, it is zero," he declared in an interview with the South Korean TV channel KBS on October 31.

"We're trapped by the American electoral context. If this had happened in the spring, we would undoubtedly have reacted differently," complained a Western diplomatic source, who believes that this new threshold could reopen the debate on the use of Western long-range weapons to hit targets on Russian territory. "We haven't yet sufficiently grasped the full dimension" of what is happening, added the same source.

Beyond the American political context, one of the reasons put forward to justify this Western hesitation is the difficulty allies have in corroborating their information on the presence of these North Korean soldiers. First revealed by South Korean intelligence on October 19, the gradual transfer of these 12,000 military personnel affiliated to Kim Jong Un's regime to the Russian region of Kursk was only confirmed by the US on October 23. "The South Koreans provided the information to the Americans," confirmed a source close to the matter. "Efforts to conceal the origin of the troops are making assessments difficult," said a source at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

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