In Disguising North Koreans Fighting in Ukraine as Buryats, Putin Repeating Stalin’s Approach in Korean War, Namsareva Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 14 – To obscure the participation of North Korean troops in his invasion force in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is having the Koreans dress and otherwise present themselves as ethnic Buryats, a nationality from the eastern part of the Russian Federation that has already many men in Ukraine.
    By doing so, Sayana Namsareva, a Buryat scholar at Cambridge says, Putin is repeating what Stalin did in the Korean War, when he ordered ethnic Buryats and other nationalities from Asian portions of the USSR to be dressed up as Chinese in order to conceal Soviet participation in that conflict (themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/14/putin-pulls-from-stalins-playbook-in-sending-north-koreans-disguised-as-buryats-to-ukraine-a86857).
    In reporting this, Mariya Vyushkova, a Buryat activist, argues that both Stalin’s actions in Korea and Putin’s in Ukraine are “two episodes of the same story,” that of “an indigenous minority being exploited in imperial wars by an imperial power. [And] not just using Buryat men as cannot fodder … but also exploiting our name and identity to cover up its true actions.”