What is North Korea learning from Russia's war in Ukraine?

And so Kate Bondar, um, um, it's, uh, we've only recently got to know each other during your time at CSIS, and I think you do some amazing work on this question of drones and drone warfare.

For our audience, which is really more of a Indo-Pacific security audience, maybe you could just tell them a little bit about how the war in Ukraine has changed the way we think about warfare.

What have we seen on the battlefield in, uh, in Ukraine? I think it's fair to say, at least when I remember thinking about this issue as Russia was building up on the border, people thought this war would go a completely different way, um, than what it is today.

So maybe you could start us off with a little, uh, primer on how we should be thinking about the war and what it means.

Yeah.

So first of all, I would like to remind, to remind our audience that the war started in 2014, not in 2022.

And 2022 was just a ...

Well, not just, but [laughs] it was a full-scale invasion, but it was a result of all the previous actions that R- Russia was, um, having against Ukraine, occupation of Crimea, occupation of Donbas.

So basically, uh, before the full-scale invasion, yes, Russia was, uh, aggregating its force along the border, and nobody took it seriously, especially in Ukraine, because nobody could actually believe that this big war might happen.

But Ukrainian force has already been trained, uh, in the war in Donbas, so we were preparing still.

We had battlefield experience, and we already started to deploy drones and unmanned systems.

So it wasn't, like, a big revolution which happened in 2022.

Drone warfare started to develop way before that, basically since 2014.

Mm.

And there was, there were, like, number of factors to this, and I think it's very important to talk about these factors because basically any country can go through the same path.

So what I mean by that is that, first of all, drones is a commercial technology which is accessible to any military in the world, to any civilian in the world.

So when the occupation of Donbas and Crimea started, basically this kind of technology, uh, was available online, and that's why Ukrainian soldiers started to buy, buy drones just, you know, with their own funds.

So that's one factor.

Another factor is that, um, Ukrainian military was quite small, and a lot of civilians joined it.

So basically they brought knowledge and experience and their professional skills from their civilian life, and that helped to adopt drones, uh, and integrate drones, uh, into the military really fast.

So by 2022, Ukrainian military already knew how to use drones, where to get this technology from.

And with, in the beginning of full-scale invasion when we didn't have enough ammunition and we didn't have enough weapon systems, what could we do? We could use what's already available and accessible.

These are drones.

So, and since then, again, it wasn't, you know, like a leapfrog or a revolution.

Drones started to penetrate into the military.