Engineers said to be supporting missile launches and reports of North Koreans killed near Donetsk
North Korean military engineers have been deployed to help Russia target Ukraine with ballistic missiles, and North Koreans operating in occupied areas of Ukraine have already been killed, senior officials in Kyiv and Seoul said.
There are dozens of North Koreans behind Russian lines, in teams that “support launcher systems for KN-23 missiles”, a source in Ukraine told the Guardian.
Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, last year travelled to Russia for a summit with Vladimir Putin where the two men bolstered their deepening ties with a secret arms deal.
Pyongyang’s ammunition shipments were vital in allowing Russian forces to advance in a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine this summer. But it appears increasingly clear that the agreement went beyond supplying materiel.
They are worlds apart yes. Russia actually has an amazing academia network that is suffering greatly from Putins politics. Most recently seen by hundreds of academics having to stop their collaboration with CERN because of the war. Compared to NK, Russia is just a normal country with lots of IT and science nerds.
However if you look at the US and their rural MAGA population, it shows that there can just be a massive rift within the population. And thats what you have in Russia too i would assume.
Much of the respect we have for Russian education goes back to the excellent STEM education they had in the Soviet days. This has largely been eroded away in modern times, and much of the technology and infrastructure they have are being held together by Soviet educated older folks.