North Korean soldiers deployed to Kursk to fight with Moscow’s forces against Ukraine are well trained but are not being sent into combat, according to a Russian military blogger.
Moscow is tight-lipped about the presence of troops sent by Pyongyang to help with its operation to oust Ukrainian troops in the Russian region where they staged an incursion on August 6. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry by email for comment.
While Russia’s state media outlets report officially approved details about the war against Ukraine, Russian Telegram channels give franker accounts of what is happening on the front line, often giving measured criticism of command decisions and territorial losses.
In a video posted Wednesday, the Telegram channel Romanov Light described a visit to the front in Kursk where the poster said that “everybody is talking about the (North) Koreans” there.
“They’re there, I saw them with my own eyes,” Romanov said, describing them as “highly trained and motivated” and able to work with any weapons.
“If you give them something, they already know how to use it and that includes heavy weaponry,” he said in an excerpt posted by X account War is Translated, but he added that “they are not used in combat directly.”
Russian war correspondent Romanov also claims that North Koreans are undeniably present in the Kursk region. He asserts that they are highly motivated and well-trained to operate “any type of weapon.” However, he notes that they are reportedly not being deployed in direct combat… pic.twitter.com/VmXAp5UBlO
— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) November 27, 2024
Ukraine has said that more than 11,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to Kursk where Kyiv faces a fierce fight to hang onto territory it gained in its surprise incursion.
There are reports that North Korean personnel had already been among those injured in hostilities. On November 8, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said North Korean troops had been killed on the battlefield.
A Ukrainian official cited by the U.K. newspaper Financial Times on Tuesday said that a general sent by Pyongyang and several officers were killed in a Storm Shadow missile strike on a Russian command center.
However, Romanov said that North Koreans were being kept from the front line. “All this talk about contact with Koreans by the enemy is nonsense, they are there but they are not taking part in combat,” he added.
When South Korea first reported that the North had sent troops, a deployment later confirmed by the U.S. there were question marks about their effectiveness, due to their lack of experience and Russian language skills.
Lee Woong-gil, a former North Korean soldier who defected to the south in 2007, told The Associated Press in October that the troops sent by Pyongyang will “consider it an honor to be selected,” adding that “most of them won’t likely come back home alive.”
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