But after the announcements and images of recent weeks, where have the North Korean soldiers gone? Questioned by the newspaper The CrossAnton Sokolin, correspondent for the media NK News and specialist in relations between Russia and North Korea, shares his questions about the presence of these soldiers. “This is a real question today“, he explains. If the latter confirms that Kim Jong Un's men are on the ground in Russia, near the front, “We will have to dig deeper to find out how many there are, who they are and what they are going to do.” The opacity of information surrounding this North Korean presence is causing confusion.
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An inconclusive first attempt
Andreï Lankov, Russian historian and professor of Korean studies at Kookmin University (South Korea), puts forward his point of view on the state of this deployment. According to him, a first attempt to have these soldiers fight took place in mid-November in the Kursk region. This attempt would have ended in failure. “These soldiers are intelligent and motivated but they do not speak Russian and do not understand orders. They may have never seen a cell phone and don't know how to decipher intelligence on the battlefield. The Russians considered that they had to be removed from the field because they risked being killed.” he confides to The Cross.
“Ghost Soldiers”
This Saturday, December 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that North Korean soldiers are carrying out “assaults” in Kursk according to “preliminary information”. “For now, just in this place. But we have information claiming that they could be used in other parts of the front“, he added. For Andrei Lankov, these fighters are still in a training phase and therefore absent from the battlefield, “they are ghost soldiers“.
