A year after Russia attacked 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.
Last year, South Korea’s arms exports rose 140 per cent to a record $17.3 billion, including deals worth $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 attack as much as South Korea’s.
And despite appeals from Ukraine and Nato to send weapons into Ukraine, South Korea has continued to walk a tightrope, balancing between its steadfast alliance with Washington and its own national and economic interests.
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 attack, arms suppliers like the United States have faced major production shortages for rocket launchers and other arms. Germany and other nations have also struggled to secure enough tanks to send to Ukraine.
As countries in Eastern Europe raced to reequip 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 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, it is said that we have been waiting for this day for a long time,” President Andrzej Duda of Poland 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 United States, Russia and France.
From 2017 to 2021, South Korea was the fastest-growing among the world’s top 25 arms exporters, ranking No. 8 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 UAE last year.
Hanwha Aerospace, South Korea’s largest defence contractor, is busier than ever, planning to scale up its production capacity three times by next year.
On a recent afternoon in Changwon, an industrial town on South Korea’s south coast, the country’s bestselling 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 Sangkyu, 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 attack of Ukraine, and Yoon has vowed to protect values like “freedom” and the “rules-based” international order.
— The New York Times
Choe Sang-Hun
The writer is the Seoul bureau chief for NYT
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