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Dozens of North Korean Soldiers Killed in Ukraine Advance.
North Korean troops fighting alongside Moscow’s soldiers in the Kursk Oblast were among those killed in massive assaults in the Russian region, according to Ukraine’s military, which has released images purporting to show the casualties.
Ukraine said last month that up to 11,000 North Korean soldiers had been deployed to Kursk where Russian forces are gathering to repel Kyiv’s bold incursion into the Russian region launched on August 6.
Drone footage posted on Sunday on the Telegram channel of a Ukrainian soldier with the call sign Madyar shows dead bodies lined up in the snow.
The post said Ukraine had drawn on its FPV drones as well as its Mahura, 95th Air Assault, 36th Separate Marine, 1st Tank and 17th Tank Brigades to fight off the assaults.
Newsweek has been unable to verify the footage and has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment by email.
It is unclear whether the North Korean personnel losses were the same as those reported by Ukrainian military intelligence on Saturday, which said that Russian and North Korean forces had lost 200 personnel after Ukrainian drones swarmed a position held by Pyongyang’s troops in an unspecified part of Kursk.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said North Korean troops were being deployed against Ukrainian forces in Kursk, while the Pentagon said last week that Pyongyang’s troops were readying for combat.
Also on Saturday, Ukraine’s military intelligence service said that North Korean soldiers had killed eight Chechen troops also fighting for Russian President Vladimir Putin in a “friendly fire” incident and that “the language barrier remains a problematic obstacle to command and coordination,” Ukrainska Pravda reported.
Chechnya, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus ruled by Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov, has sent large numbers troops to fight in Ukraine since Moscow launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In its latest update, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank said that North Korean troops’ communication struggles with Russian forces in the region were likely “undermining Russian military operations” and compromising effective combat coordination.
Poor integration and communication problems between the troops from both countries “will likely continue to cause friction in Russian military operations in Kursk Oblast,” Washington, D.C., based ISW said on Sunday.
Russia has managed to recapture around 40 percent of the territory Kyiv’s forces seized in Kursk, a region that borders Ukraine, but Moscow has gathered 50,000 troops, among them North Koreans, ahead of a large-scale offensive, The New York Times has reported, citing U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
