The North Koreans showed up on the battlefield in late October, and have since earned a grim reputation among Ukrainians for apparently preferring to kill themselves rather than surrender.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said North Korea has seen 4,000 dead or wounded soldiers since joining the war.
On Jan. 11, Ukrainian forces managed to capture two North Koreans alive; they were taken to Kyiv, where South Korea’s spy agency has been assisting, for medical treatment and interrogation.
Neither the Kremlin nor Pyongyang, which signed a limitless partnership treaty with each other last summer, have confirmed North Korea’s participation in the war against Ukraine. Kyiv has even reported Russians were instructed to burn the faces of dead North Koreans to make them difficult to identify.
That makes capture of the two North Koreans of enormous propaganda value to Ukraine. During video interrogations, published by Zelenskyy, the North Korean POWs said they were told they were being deployed to Russia for training and then fighting, and that they were issued fake Russian military IDs.
The Ukrainian paratroopers who captured both said they found one soldier wounded in a trench after a failed Russian assault on Ukrainian positions.
