Vietnam War photo misrepresented as ‘North Korean soldier captured in Ukraine’

“A North Korean POW captured in Ukraine, they all look like they’re starved,” reads the Korean-language text overlaid on the photo shared on Facebook on October 21.

The picture depicts a shirtless young man kneeling before a soldier wielding a knife.

The post emerged after South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said on October 18 that North Korea had deployed soldiers to shore up its ally with 1,500 special forces already in Russia’s Far East undergoing training. The spy agency estimated that the North could send around 12,000 soldiers in total (archived link).

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also flagged intelligence reports saying North Korea was training 10,000 soldiers to support Russia (archived link).

Neither NATO nor the United States have confirmed the deployment report yet, but both have cast it as a potentially dangerous development should Seoul’s assertions prove correct (archived links here and here).

North Korea’s representative at the United Nations dismissed the claim as “groundless rumours” and that his country’s relationship with Russia was “legitimate and cooperative” (archived link).

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Screenshot of the misleading claim shared on Facebook. Captured October 22

Pyongyang and Moscow have been allies since North Korea’s founding after World War II.

They have drawn even closer since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Seoul and Washington claiming that Kim Jong Un has been sending weapons for use in Ukraine.

Identical posts were shared on Facebook here, here and here.

Comments left in the posts indicated some users appeared to believe the claim.

“His expression looks like he wants to go to the South,” one user wrote.

Another said: “Will you defect to the South, comrade?”

But the image was decades old, taken during the Vietnam War.

Vietnam War photo

A reverse image search on Google found the image published as part of LIFE magazine’s photo collection on Google Arts & Culture (archived link).

The photo, credited to renowned war photographer Larry Burrows, includes a caption that read, “Bayonet wielding South Vietnamese soldier menacing captured Vietcong suspect during interrogation.”

Below is a screenshot comparison between the image shared with the false claim on Facebook (left) and the original picture published in the LIFE photo collection (right):

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Screenshot comparison between the image shared with the false claim on Facebook (left) and the original picture published in the LIFE photo collection (right)

Burrows captured a diverse array of images of war throughout his career, spending nine years in particular documenting the Vietnam War from 1962, according to LIFE magazine’s profile on the photographer (archived link).

The same photograph was published in reports in the Guardian and Der Spiegel as part of collections of iconic images of the Vietnam War (archived links here and here). \