“Here they are. The boys from North Korea.”
That is how a male voice describes what appears to be a group of soldiers filmed in a video geolocated by The New York Times to a military training site in the Russian Far East village of Sergeyevka, in district Primorsky Krai. The person filming the video then walks toward the crowd, which is gathered near the entrance of a green and white building.
In recent days, videos have been circulating on social media that appear to show North Korean troops in Russia.
For weeks, South Korea and Ukraine have been saying that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has dispatched troops to help with Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine. The United States publicly agreed with that assessment on Wednesday, saying that Pyongyang had moved at least 3,000 soldiers to several training camps in the Russian Far East, not far from the North Korean border. Even President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared to acknowledge the presence of Pyongyang’s forces in his country.
On Thursday, Ukraine claimed 12,000 North Korean troops were now in Russia, adding that some had arrived in the Kursk region, where Ukraine has held territory since staging an incursion in August. On Friday, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said it was possible that some North Korean troops could be deployed to Kursk, according to Reuters. The Times could not independently confirm whether any North Korean troops are in Kursk.
The footage from Sergeyevka was posted on Telegram by Astra, a Russian independent media organization, along with another clip that showed soldiers milling around, chatting and smoking.
The men are wearing a standard set of Russian fatigues known as the all-season field uniform, which is made by a Russian company called BTK Group, according to Dmitry Kuznets, a military analyst with Meduza, another independent news outlet in Russia.
In addition to military clothing, the North Korean troops have received weapons and forged identification documents, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. That would allow them to pose as people from eastern Siberia, where the Indigenous Buryat and Yakut people bear Asian facial features.
In another video, released by a Ukrainian government agency, the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, dozens of soldiers can be seen standing in a long line inside a building. The Ukrainian agency, which was established to counter Russian disinformation, said that the video showed North Korean soldiers preparing for deployment at a training facility in Sergeyevka.
The Ukrainian agency was not willing to provide the original video file or details about the video’s provenance to The Times. The Times could not confirm the exact location or time the video was filmed. However, the interior matches military cafeteria design in Russia and Ukraine. It is possible the video was filmed at a building in the Sergeyevka complex; the windows resemble those seen on a building adjacent to the military barracks where the apparent North Korean soldiers were recorded milling around. There are also signs of increased activity at the building: fencing between the building and the barracks was recently taken down, and trash and cars are visible in satellite imagery outside the building for the first time in years.
The footage contains the voices of soldiers speaking with a distinctively North Korean accent, said Kim Seung-chul, a defector from North Korea who heads North Korea Reform Radio, a Seoul-based station that broadcasts outside news into North Korea.
The troops take turns filling their military packs with supplies that appear to have been unpacked from boxes with BTK Group’s logo. Mr. Kuznets said he was able to identify sleeping bags, jackets, pants, shirts and suspenders in the footage.
John F. Kirby, the national security spokesman at the White House, on Wednesday offered few details about the North Korean presence in Russia. He had no specific assessment of what kind of training the North Korean troops were receiving nor was it certain, he said, that they would be deployed to the war in Ukraine or how useful they would be given the language and cultural differences. “But,” he said, “this is certainly a highly concerning possibility.”
The post These Videos Appear to Show North Korean Troops in Russia appeared first on New York Times.
