North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia are still causing problems for Ukrainian forces more than a year after they were first deployed in support of Moscow’s war.
The North Korean soldiers who were deployed to Russia’s Kursk region to thwart a Ukrainian incursion were initially tasked with brutal infantry assaults that resulted in high casualties. Their role has since shifted to drone reconnaissance and artillery operations.
“The biggest problem from North Korea is not the soldiers, but the artillery shells,” said Yehor Cherniev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliamentary committee on national security, defense, and intelligence.
“They had not so many soldiers involved in Kursk,” Cherniev told Business Insider in an interview this week.
North Korea has sent millions of artillery shells and multiple rocket launcher ammunition to Russia during the war, along with the cannons and launchers that can fire these munitions. Pyongyang has also provided Moscow with at least 100 ballistic missiles and anti-tank weapons.
In fall 2024, around 11,000 North Korean soldiers deployed to Kursk in western Russia to help Moscow recapture hundreds of square miles of territory that it lost to Ukraine during a surprise incursion a few months earlier. Their deployment marked a dramatic expansion of Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict.
The North Korean forces had no modern experience in major combat operations, so Russia trained them in drone, artillery, infantry, and trench-clearing operations.
They were initially used for front-line assaults against the Ukrainians, which the US described at the time as largely ineffective “human wave”-style tactics, but they now appear to have taken on more of a support role.
“As of January 2026, a group of North Korean troops is located in the Kursk region, from which they launch attacks on Ukrainian border communities,” Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said last week in an update.
The GUR said the North Korean soldiers positioned there fire at Ukraine with artillery and multiple rocket launcher systems and use reconnaissance drones to collect targeting data to adjust their strikes, employing the tech the way the Russians do.
The intelligence agency said North Korea regularly rotates soldiers into Kursk, and most of the roughly 3,000 troops who returned home have become military instructors, teaching what they’ve learned about modern combat tactics to Pyongyang’s forces.
“I think it was more for North Korea just to get the experience of the modern war and to learn this experience in their army,” Cherniev said of Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict.
Neither Russia’s defense ministry nor its US embassy responded to a request for comment on the involvement of North Korean forces in the war.
Western intelligence estimates that thousands of North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded fighting for Russia. The deployment followed the signing of a mutual defense pact that Pyongyang and Moscow in 2024, one of many indications of increased military cooperation between the heavily sanctioned states.
The Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, which includes the US and 10 other countries, has said that the expansion of military, political, and economic cooperation between North Korea and Russia violates United Nations Security Council resolutions.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has acknowledged that his forces have suffered losses in this war, a rare admission in a conflict where combat losses often go unacknowledged.
Britain’s defense ministry said in mid-January that Russia has likely sustained 1.2 million casualties since it launched its full-scale invasion nearly four years ago, including 415,000 soldiers killed and wounded in 2025 alone.
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