Ukrainian troops have captured two North Korean soldiers in the western Russian region of Kursk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported this Saturday. These are two soldiers who are part of the contingent of around 11,000 troops sent by Pyongyang to help Russia recover this region, occupied by kyiv’s forces last August and the scene of a new Ukrainian offensive just a week ago. As reported by Zelensky on his social networks, the prisoners have been injured, but have received medical attention and have been taken to kyiv to be interrogated by the SBU, the country’s intelligence services. “The SBU is carrying out the necessary investigative measures to establish all the circumstances of the participation of the North Korean army in the Russian war against Ukraine,” this body indicated in a statement. This is the second time that Ukrainian forces have captured a recruit of this nationality, after at the end of the year they announced the capture of another, who died almost immediately.
One of the two North Korean soldiers was captured on January 9 by fighters from the 84th Tactical Group of the Special Operations Forces, and the other by paratroopers from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. President Zelensky has thanked both units for their work. “That task was not easy: normally, the Russians and other North Korean militaries finish off their wounded and do everything possible to ensure that there is no evidence of another state’s involvement in the war against Ukraine.”
The captives do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, so communication with them is carried out through Korean translators in cooperation with South Korean intelligence, according to the SBU statement. At the time of capture, one of them was carrying a Russian-style military ID issued in the name of another person with registration in the Russian republic of Tuva, in the Siberia district. The other was undocumented.
During the interrogation, the prisoner who was found with the documentation indicated that it was issued in Russia in the fall of 2024 and that subsequently part of the North Korean combat units were training the Russian army for a week. The same young man has stated that he was born in 2005, that he is a rifleman and has served in the army in North Korea since 2021. “It is noteworthy that the prisoner, like the Russian military at the beginning of the large-scale invasion, emphasizes that “He was supposedly going to receive training and not go to war against Ukraine,” emphasizes the SBU.
The second prisoner of war has confirmed his companion’s testimony in writing, since due to a jaw injury he cannot speak. According to preliminary data, he was born in 1999 and has served in the North Korean army as a reconnaissance sniper since 2016.
For the SBU, the capture of the two North Korean soldiers is another “indisputable proof” of North Korea’s participation in the Russian war. The presence of these foreign troops in Kursk has never been confirmed by either Moscow or Pyongyang — in fact, at the time, North Korea described these reports as “unfounded rumors” — but during the last two months different pieces of evidence have occurred. that attest to its presence and has also resized the international dimension of the large-scale invasion initiated by Russia on Ukrainian soil in 2022.
The friendship that has led to the participation of the Kim Jong-un regime has been described by NATO as a “significant escalation” of the conflict, and has also put North Korea’s Asian neighbors on guard. To countries like South Korea and Japan, who are concerned about the technological transfers in the ballistic and nuclear field provided by Moscow to Pyongyang, which could destabilize the conflict between the two Koreas or Taiwan.
In this regard, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrii Sibiga, spoke out this afternoon: “The first North Korean prisoners of war are now in kyiv. They are regular DPRK troops, not mercenaries, who participate in a war of aggression against a European country. The security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific region are directly linked. We need to exert maximum pressure against the regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang,” he wrote on his X account.
Although only a couple of cases of death or capture of North Korean soldiers are known so far, President Zelensky already reported last Thursday at the opening of the 25th meeting of the Contact Group on Defense Issues of Ukraine, in Rammstein (Germany). , that the DPRK’s losses amount to 4,000 soldiers. “Putin is not only continuing to invest in aggression, he is doubling it. He has even started hiring North Korean soldiers to keep this war going. North Korea is learning modern warfare. They don’t value their people. And we know it. They are losing them; 4,000 so far,” Zelensky said during the meeting, held under the chairmanship of US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. This figure, however, has not been independently verified.
