With reports that North Korea may be on the verge of deploying troops to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, Washington Times Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak tells the latest Threat Status weekly podcast that Moscow has already lured a range of Central Asians and Africans into its soldier ranks on the ground in Ukrainian territory.

Mr. Ptak, who writes front-line dispatches for Threat Status from inside Ukraine, tells the podcast: “There have been Pakistani soldiers found in the Russian army. You’ve had people from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. You’ve had people from African countries that were lured into Russia by basically telling them that you know, that you would get a good wage and you would just do like a six-month stint.”

His comments come amid South Korean warnings of growing North Korean activity inside Ukraine, as well as British intelligence reports that more than 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, with Moscow losing an average of 1,271 soldiers per day last month.

“There’s this myth that Russia has this endless amount of people that they can throw into the meat grinder,” says Mr. Ptak. “Well, why are they literally getting Central Asian migrants into Russia under false pretense of work and then conscripting them and sending them straight to the front?”

North Korea has put its border artillery units on standby after angrily claiming that South Korea conducted drone operations in the night skies over its capital, Pyongyang.

Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon has the full story, reporting from Seoul that the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un went public on Friday with complaints that drones had dropped leaflets on the city three times this month. Photos released by state media appeared to show a flying wing-style drone and stacks of apparent propaganda leaflets.

Over the weekend, one of North Korea’s most senior figures warned the South faced “a horrible disaster” if it did not desist, and on Monday North Korea announced that it had ordered eight border artillery brigades to be placed on heightened alert.

There were also signs that Pyongyang was preparing explosives to demolish road and rail links crossing the Demilitarized Zone, a move it announced last week. That is purely symbolic — the border crossings are entirely closed — but analysts say it constitutes just another sign that the Kim regime has dropped all pretense of diplomacy and is further fortifying itself against its southern neighbor.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is probing the “Salt Typhoon” hacking group suspected of breaching systems used by major American telecom companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies. Lawmakers say the suspected hack may have accessed information from “systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.”

The committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. John Moolenaar, and ranking Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, wrote a letter last week to the companies’ executives seeking a “closed-door briefing” on the suspected hack.

Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, director of the National Security Agency, said at a security conference on Oct. 6 that his agency was in the early days of an investigation. When asked last week about the Salt Typhoon hackers’ actions, NSA Cybersecurity Director Dave Luber said China has been known to use security vulnerabilities to gain access to systems around the world, particularly in the United States.

China’s government is cracking down on Catholic and Protestant churches in the country by ordering the removal of images of Jesus and his replacement with photos of President Xi Jinping, according to a U.S. government report on anti-religious activities in China.

The officially atheist Chinese Communist Party has launched what the report calls a campaign of coercive “sinicization” of religion that is targeting all elements of spiritual activities in the country. The report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) also delves into what it calls China’s “egregious human rights abuses” against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples living in the northwest Xinjiang territory.

With regard to Christians, the USCIRF found that Beijing has “ordered the removal of crosses from churches, replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi, required the display of CCP slogans at the entrances of churches, censored religious texts, imposed CCP-approved religious materials, and instructed clergy to preach CCP ideology.”

The anti-religion campaign was launched by Mr. Xi and is backed by state-controlled religious organizations. The USCIRF report, which was made public last month, said that “tens of millions” of Christians have rejected the government-controlled churches and instead are worshiping independently.

In the Vietnam War, Hanoi ultimately persevered over Washington because the Vietnamese simply refused to stop fighting, writes Herman Pirchner Jr., president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington. “In the end,” he argues, “Vietnam was more important to the Vietnamese than it was to the Americans.”

“A similar dynamic forced Moscow to leave Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade of Islamist insurgency,” writes Mr. Pirchner, adding that “the same idea applies today in Ukraine. In the end, Ukraine is more important to the Ukrainians than it is to the Russians, and the potential cost of surrender — the destruction of Ukrainian identity — is unacceptable to the vast majority of the country’s population.”

“Given that reality,” he writes, “providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs is the surest way to hasten the day that Russia offers Ukraine a peace that it can live with.”

• Oct. 14 — The Future of America’s International Alliances and Partnerships: What’s at Stake in the 2024 Election, Brookings Institution

• Oct. 15 — Signals Intelligence in the Digital Age: A Conversation with George C. Barnes, Former NSA Deputy Director, Intelligence Studies Project/University of Texas at Austin

• Oct. 15 — The Trajectory of Iraq’s Recovery, Development, and Global Partnerships, Atlantic Council

• Oct. 15 — Ukraine’s Energy Sector: Short-Term Threats and Long-Term Prospects, Wilson Center

• Oct. 16 — Assessing Opportunities for Protection of Civilians in Sudan, Stimson Center

• Oct. 17 — Africa in the New Cold War, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 17 — Strengthening the Allied Industrial Base, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 8-10 — IISS Prague Defense Summit 2024, International Institute for Strategic Studies