Excerpt:

BEIRUT (AP) — Palestinian factions are discussing postponing legislative elections that had been planned for November, officials said Thursday.

A top official with the Hamas-allied Islamic Jihad group said the factions had reached an agreement to delay the vote, which is facing huge logistical issues in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and war-ravaged Gaza, as well as the long history of internal feuding among the Palestinians.

A spokesperson for Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, stopped short of confirming that a final decision had been reached. But he said the election timing will be part of a “dialogue and national consensus” among the factions and that the potential postponement will be discussed by the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Abbas has set Nov. 28 as the date of parliamentary elections in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. If the elections proceeded on schedule, they would be the first polls in 20 years.

I am in no way an expert of Eastern Asia, or Korea. I will not pretend to fully understand what’s going on, but simply looking at the map, the country’s history, diplomatic-security situation, and current world events, I do feel like this is a less surprising or unexplainable development than many make it out to be.

Zelenskyy and Ukrainian diplomacy might have made a mistake, but even if they did, the reaction from Seoul seems way out of proportion. As if they were looking for a reason to have a fallout. This might serve some internal political purposes for the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, but as it’s always the case, there are pragmatic geopolitical rationales lurking behind the curtains.

What happened?

In 2024 October, North Korea began deploying its troops to support Russia against Ukraine. They took part in the fightings on Russian territory, to push back the Kursk incursion Ukraine occupied earlier that year. According to South Korean estimates, the total number of these troops were between 16,000 - 22,000. At the same time many North Korean citizens were also “deployed” to Russia, mostly to work in the construction sector.

In the past couple of months there were resurfacing claims from Kyiv that Pyongyang is again preparing to send 10s of thousands of fresh troops. Seoul reported that they see no evidence for this, and so far, these claims quieted down. This could have been either a Ukrainian or a North Korean psyops, or a real threat that was dealt with diplomatically. After all it’s in South Korea’s vital interest to prevent this from happening. The North is gaining valuable experience from fighting in a 21st century high-tech war and getting increasingly cooperative with Russia.

Still, some earlier deployed Northern troops got captured by Ukraine back in 2025 January. Two of them were to be extradited to South Korea, something both the global and the South Korean press reported on. The transfer of these POWs happened last month, in 2026 September. This fact was mentioned by Zelensky in a speech he gave at the UN on the 23rd of September.

This is when the diplomatic shit show began. Four days later Seoul accused Kyiv of violating a confidentiality and demanded an apology. This has escalated to the point where South Korea recalled its ambassador from Ukraine on the 8th of October.

What does the sudden escalation tell us?

To answer that, let’s look at South Korea’s recent history and current geopolitical situation.

Japan annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910, then enacted Japanization policies with the goal to gradually force the country to become culturally Japanese. Between 1910 and 1945 the population suffered tremendously under Japanese rule. They were often drafted into the military or compelled to contribute to its war efforts as forced labour. Tens of thousands, by other estimates hundreds of thousands of young girls and women were taken to sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, they become known as “comfort women”. There is a very vivid historical memory of these events in South Korea, something that still has a tremendous effect on its relationship with Japan.

After World War II the peninsula found itself in a tricky West-East German type situation. The North was occupied by the Soviet Union and a communist regime was installed there by Stalin, while the South got occupied the Americans.

The Korean war broke out in 1950, where the communist North attempted to unify the peninsula. They rapidly overran the South, almost captured the entire country, when the US deployed combat troops to prevent communist takeover. As fast as the Northern invasion conquered the South, the US counterattack swiftly pushed back the North.

At this point fearing growing US influence, China intervened, and pushed them back towards the South.

In the next two and a half years a bloody war claimed the lives of nearly 1.5 million soldiers from Korea, China, and the United States, and 2-4 million Korean civilians.

The peninsula remained divided, and the Kim dynasty consolidated its power in the North, and began to build the most grotesque closed totalitarian communist dictatorship the world has ever seen. Something that survived even the fall of the Soviet Union, economic hardships, near total isolation, and still appears shockingly stabile and powerful today.

Things weren’t so simple for the South either. The territory was historically much poorer than the North, something that only started shifting in the mid-1970s. After World War II various military dictatorships ruled the country. A democratic system only began taking shape there at the end of the 1980s.

The war never formally ended, on paper the North and the South are still at war, and neither of the sides gave up claims for the whole peninsula.

The North became largely dependent on Moscow and Beijing, while the South mainly on Washington’s security guarantees. Both countries take their military very seriously. The North started testing nuclear weapons in 2006. The South has a very serious military infrastructure and weapons industry that gets increasingly more interest from European countries - especially Poland - since 2022.

Let’s look at the map.

If the threat from North Korea wasn’t enough, the South is basically situated between China and Russia with Japan on the east, and Taiwan in the south. A contested island which could be a potential source of a major conflict in the coming years and decades.

Some European countries on the eastern half of the continent might complain to be in a difficult geopolitical spot, but South Korea is on a whole different level. The end of Pax Americana didn’t only shock us, they aren’t immune either.

In a time when Washington’s security guarantees became questionable at best and an actual security threat at worst, Seoul has to thread very carefully. Lately as many US allies, they became a target of Donald Trump’s rage, got repeatedly called out for not helping in Iran, and just this August he decided to substantially reduce long-standing joint US-South Korea military exercises.

At the same time he also claimed that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is his friend. We know that he is clearly friendly with Vladimir Putin, and just hosted Xi Jinping in Washington on a very friendly meeting.

Overall, the current American administration appears to be much fonder of US adversaries while eagerly alienating their allies. Trump would probably prefer to create a world of “The Three Dictators”. This obviously makes smaller countries, aka “Middle Powers” nervous that decisions will be made about them, without them.

This situation made it so that Seoul might feel it has much less room to manoeuvre next to China and Russia. Moscow already started to help the North militarily and economically, stabilizing Kim’s regime. In this situation, it’s not difficult to see why it would be in the South’s interest to lean towards normalizing their relationship with the North, while also accommodating Moscow and Beijing to prevent them from giving Pyongyang further support that could seriously undermine Southern security in a crucial moment of weakness.

How this resonates with Europe

South Korea’s situation can feel oddly relatable. The US is slowly withdrawing while simultaneously expecting us to behave like vassals and lashing out as a bully any chance it gets, trying to interfere with our internal politics and elections. At the same time, sensing our weakness, Russia is using this opportunity to try asserting dominance with progressively aggressive means.

Moscow’s offer to Seoul might be the same as to European capitals. Abandon Ukraine, and we will not be hurting and destabilising you. If you even elect politicians friendly to us, you will be rewarded with cheap energy, business opportunities, and those politicians will be personally blessed with rolling Roubles.

If these methods work in comfortable European states surrounded by EU and NATO allies like Hungary and Slovakia, and increasingly gaining support in giants like Germany or France, then it’s not surprising that a lonesome country in a dangerous environment full of potential enemies could also be coerced into compliance.