North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met with families of soldiers killed in overseas military operations, promising them a beautiful life, the state-run media said in a statement released with pictures on Saturday.
It follows last week’s ceremony in the capital, Pyongyang, that paid tribute to soldiers who returned from combat in Ukraine, an event where Kim was seen sobbing in tears and placing posthumous state awards on the soldiers’ corpses.
According to Saturday’s statement from the Korean Central News Agency KCNA, Kim expressed deep condolences to all the bereaved families of the officers who fell in the battlegrounds on foreign lands.
The news of the death of your beloved children and husbands must have come as a great shock to you all, since you did not know whether they were alive or not, Kim was quoted as saying.
Our Party and government will bring all the glory to the heroes revered by the whole nation and to their excellent parents who brought them up to be admirable men. They will also do their best to provide you, ahead of others, with a beautiful life in the country defended at the cost of the lives of the martyrs, Kim said.
According to KCNA, Kim presented the photos of the martyrs to the families at a ceremony on Friday at the Mokran House, a venue used for high-level meetings in Pyongyang.
In April, Pyongyang confirmed that it had sent troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying that some of its soldiers had been killed in combat, without specifying the number.