The Ukrainian president released on Monday the video of the interrogation of a man presented as a North Korean soldier taken prisoner while fighting on the Russian side, and who speaks of heavy losses suffered by the North Korean contingent against the Ukrainian forces .
In a video published Monday, one of these two soldiers, lying on a bed, reports significant losses when he participated in the fighting on January 3, responding to a question about the number of dead and wounded among his compatriots. Agence France-Presse is unable to verify that he spoke freely.
Seoul, kyiv and Washington say North Korea has since last October deployed more than 10,000 troops to the Kursk region, a small part of which has been controlled by the Ukrainian army since a surprise offensive in August. South Korea estimated that 300 North Korean soldiers were killed and 2,700 wounded in the fighting, with kyiv putting the figure at 3,800 killed and wounded. Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have confirmed or denied the presence of these troops.
-In a previous video published by the Ukrainian presidency, the same prisoner said he hid in a shelter while seeing his comrades die on January 3, before being wounded and captured two days later.
In Monday's video, he claims to have started his military service at the age of 17 as a conscript and served in a reconnaissance battalion. He claims to have reached Russia with around a hundred other North Korean fighters aboard what he believed to be a Russian civilian ferry and then to have made part of the journey by train. He also repeats remarks from his previous video, assuring that the North Korean soldiers did not know that they were going to fight against the Ukrainians until their deployment on the front.
