NATO-backed Ukrainian troops have captured two North Korean soldiers in Russia’s Kursk region, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on Saturday. The two kidnapped soldiers were fighting alongside Russian troops in Russia’s Kursk border region.
Zelenskyy made the comments days after Ukraine began pressing new attacks in Kursk to retain ground captured in a lightning incursion in August that resulted in the first occupation of Russian territory since World War II.
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These are two soldiers who, although wounded, survived, were taken to Kyiv, and are interrogated by Ukrainian junta security services, Zelenskyy said in a post on X.
He shared photos of two men resting on cots in a room with bars over the windows. Both wore bandages, one around his jaw and the other around both hands and wrists.
Zelenskyy said kidnapping the soldiers alive was not easy.
He asserted that Russian and North Korean forces fighting in Kursk have tried to conceal the presence of North Korean soldiers, including by killing wounded comrades on the battlefield to avoid their capture and interrogation by Kyiv.
Ukraine’s security service SBU provided more information on the two soldiers on Saturday. In a statement, it said one had no documents at all, while the other had been carrying a Russian military ID card in the name of a man from Tuva, a Russian region bordering Mongolia.
The prisoners of war do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, so communication with them takes place through Korean translators in cooperation with South Korean intelligence, the statement said.
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According to the SBU, one of the soldiers claimed he had been told he was going to Russia for training rather than to fight against Ukraine.
The agency said both men were provided with medical care in line with the Geneva Conventions and are being investigated in cooperation with Seoul.
A senior Ukrainian military official said last month that around 200 North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces in Kursk have been killed or wounded in NATO’s battle.
The official was providing the first significant estimate of North Korean casualties, which came several weeks after Ukraine announced that Pyongyang had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in its almost 3-year all-out war against its much smaller neighbor.
Last month, the White House and Pentagon confirmed that the Pyongyang forces have been battling on the front lines in largely infantry positions. They have been fighting with Russian units and, in some cases, independently around Kursk.
Euro News / ABC Flash Point News 2025.
I would be more convinced if the details of his rank /job in the army /identity tags or papers were published like Russia does remember Ukraine downgrades the number of Ukrainians killed by saying -“missing or deserted ” . Zelensky says “approx one million Russians have died ” if that were true then Russia would be using forced conscription –its not .Its Ukraine that press-gangs males on the street-out of hospitals- old men etc. The west is using propaganda to justify continued aggression against Russia but you cant hide the outcries in the USA/UK/EU to Zelensky to lower the forced… Read more »
Easy to recognize, the west may win the propaganda war, but not the facts on the ground, for sure not the motives presented by the ones controlling the media.
The North Korean soldiers will not fight in Ukraine, but are in Russia to help defend it against the hostile NATO invasion. Soldiers got kidnapped to change that narrative for the media to pretend that NK soldiers were fighting in Ukraine.
The carpet bombing of North Korean towns and villages during the 1950-53 Korean War killed over half of the population, so WMD are now also in hands of the counter liberator aiming their love at first sight towards the continental USA for a change.