“Hundreds” of North Korean soldiers were killed or injured in the fighting between them and the Ukrainian army in the Russian region of Kursk, a senior American military official said Tuesday.
“Several hundred casualties, this is our latest estimate of North Korea’s losses,” said the official on condition of anonymity, specifying that this count included “lightly wounded to those killed in combat”. Earlier on Tuesday, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army, Oleksandr Syrsky, said that, “for three days the enemy has been carrying out intense offensive operations in the Kursk region, actively using units of the northern army -Korean”, adding that it had already “suffered heavy losses”.
Several thousand North Korean soldiers have been sent to Russia in recent weeks to support the Russian army, according to Westerners. For its part, the Kremlin has each time evaded questions on the subject, not wanting to confirm this information. Pyongyang has neither confirmed nor denied this unprecedented deployment. These troops “had never fought before,” the American official said Tuesday, judging that this could explain “why they suffered such losses against the Ukrainians.”
