The North Koreans appeared on the battlefield in late October and have since acquired a dark reputation among Ukrainians, as they apparently prefer to commit suicide rather than surrender.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said North Korea had seen 4,000 soldiers dead or wounded since entering the war.
On January 11, Ukrainian forces managed to capture two North Koreans alive; they were taken to kyiv, where South Korean intelligence services are assisting, for treatment and interrogation.
Neither the Kremlin nor Pyongyang, which signed an unlimited partnership treaty last summer, have confirmed North Korea’s participation in the war against Ukraine. kyiv even reported that the Russians were instructed to burn the faces of dead North Koreans to make them difficult to identify.
The capture of the two North Koreans therefore has enormous propaganda value for Ukraine. In video interrogations released by Zelenskyy, the North Korean prisoners of war said they were told they were being deployed to Russia for training and then combat, and were issued fake ID cards. Russian military identity.
Ukrainian paratroopers who captured the two soldiers said they found a wounded soldier in a trench after a failed Russian assault on Ukrainian positions.
