South Korea is exporting billions in arms. Just not to Ukraine
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Even as South Korea expands its weapons sales globally, it has refused to send lethal assistance to Ukraine itself.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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CHANGWON, South Korea – A year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war has spurred a global effort to produce more missiles, tanks, artillery shells and other munitions. And few countries have moved as quickly as South Korea to increase output.
In 2022, South Korea’s arms exports rose 140 per cent to a record US$17.3 billion (S$23.3 billion), including deals worth US$12.4 billion to sell tanks, howitzers, fighter jets and multiple rocket launchers to Poland, one of Ukraine’s closest allies.
But as South Korea expands weapons sales globally, it has refused to send lethal assistance to Ukraine itself.
Instead, it has focused on filling the world’s rearmament gap while resisting any direct role in arming Ukraine, imposing strict export control rules on all its sales.
South Korea’s wariness stems in part from its reluctance to openly antagonise Moscow, from which it hopes for cooperation in imposing new sanctions against an increasingly belligerent North Korea. Countries throughout Latin America, Israel and others have also declined to send weapons directly to Ukraine.
Yet few nations’ defence industries have boomed as a result of the Russian invasion as much as South Korea’s. And despite appeals from Ukraine and Nato to send weapons into Ukraine,
Unlike American allies in Europe that scaled down their militaries and arms production capacities at the end of the Cold War, South Korea has kept a robust domestic defence supply chain to meet demand from its own armed forces and to guard against North Korea.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to secure enough tanks to send to Ukraine.
Buyers began looking elsewhere.
As countries in Eastern Europe raced to re-equip and upgrade their militaries after sending their Soviet-era weapons to Ukraine, South Korea became an enticing option.
The contracts for Poland’s tanks and howitzers were signed in late August 2022 with South Korea’s top defence contractors. It took little more than three months for the first shipment to arrive. Poland appreciated the speed.
“When a shipment is received, (we often say that) we have been waiting for this day for a long time,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said, welcoming the shipment’s arrival at the seaport.
“With great satisfaction, I want to emphasise that we did not wait long for this day.”
The orders from Poland were a boon to the government of President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has vowed to make his country the fourth-largest weapons exporter by 2027, after the US, Russia and France.
From 2017 to 2021, South Korea was the fastest-growing among the world’s top 25 arms exporters, ranking eighth, with a 2.8 per cent share of the global market, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
That was before it landed contracts with Poland, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in 2022.
Hanwha Aerospace, South Korea’s largest defence contractor, is busier than ever, planning to scale up its production capacity by three times, by 2024.
On a recent afternoon in Changwon, an industrial town on South Korea’s south coast, the country’s best-selling weapon, the K9 self-propelled howitzer, was taking shape amid white-hot sparks and robotic drilling inside a Hanwha plant the size of six football fields.
“We need to add two more assembly lines to meet a growing demand,” said Hanwha engineer Park Sang-kyu, referring to orders of K9s from Poland and other nations, as he pointed to empty corners where the new facilities will go. The layout of the giant factory is being adjusted to accommodate them.
South Korea denounced the invasion of Ukraine, and Mr Yoon has vowed to protect values like “freedom” and the “rules-based” international order.
But South Korea’s eagerness to increase arms exports amid the war has also highlighted its difficulties with that balancing act.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned South Korea against aiding Ukraine militarily, saying that doing so would ruin relations between Russia and South Korea and could prompt Russia to deepen military ties with North Korea.
The war in Ukraine has already moved North Korea closer to Russia; it openly supported the invasion, and Washington has accused it of shipping artillery shells, rockets and other munitions to Russia.
When Mr Yoon and US President Joe Biden met in Seoul last May, they agreed to cooperate on the defence industry supply chain.
And although South Korea does not make the Soviet-era weapons Ukraine needs most, many of its arms systems are compatible with the Nato weaponry heading to Ukraine.
Hanwha hopes to share its technologies in artillery and armoured vehicles with the US and help arm Nato with weapons the Americans no longer make or are unable to supply fast enough.
“The United States cannot make every weapon,” said Hanwha Aerospace president Son Jae-il.
“Geopolitics has made it our destiny to nurture a defence industry,” Mr Son said recently at Hanwha’s Seoul office.
While the US made high-end weaponry like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and state-of-the-art aircraft in its rivalry with Russia and China, South Korea has focused on “mid-level weapons like artillery, armoured vehicles and tanks, and accumulated competitive technologies there,” he added.
Hanwha has supplied the South Korean military with almost 1,200 K9 howitzers since the late 1990s, and hundreds more for India, Turkey, Estonia, Finland and Norway.
Hanwha’s K9s accounted for 55 per cent of the world’s self-propelled howitzer export market from 2000 to 2021, according to South Korean analysts.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, Hanwha has set its sights firmly on the global market, with the full support of the South Korean government and military.
Mr Yoon met his Polish counterpart last June to help seal the weapons deals in 2022. In January, his office announced it had opened a new task force to promote arms exports. NYTIMES
