Wounded North Korean soldiers died in Ukraine after being taken prisoner, Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Friday. For its part, the United States claims that the soldiers dispatched by Pyongyang are only considered cannon fodder. They suffer “a lot of losses. A lot. And we see that the Russian military and North Korean supervisors are not at all interested in their survival,” the Ukrainian president said in his daily address.
“Several North Korean soldiers died today. Our soldiers managed to capture them. But they were very seriously injured and could not be saved,” he said, before denouncing “the madness of which dictatorships are capable” by sending soldiers to be killed “in battles in Europe” .
“These human waves were not very effective”
“Everything is done to make it impossible for us to capture Koreans. The Russians are sending them to attack with minimal protection,” insisted the Ukrainian president. The same day, Washington assured that “more than a thousand” soldiers deployed by Pyongyang in Russia to fight against Ukraine had been killed or injured during “hopeless” assaults in the Kursk border region. “It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders view them as troops that can be sacrificed,” added John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US National Security Council.
“North Korean forces carry out massive assaults […] These human waves were not very effective […]. We estimate that to date, more than 1,000 people have been injured or killed, he said. “The involvement of the North Koreans in the fighting did not have a significant impact,” said Yevgen Yerin, spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence. According to him, these troops do not have the experience of modern warfare, particularly in the face of drones which have become omnipresent on the battlefield. They employ “more primitive tactics, from the Second World War or post-World War II.”
Our file on the war in Ukraine
According to kyiv, 12,000 North Korean soldiers, including “around 500 officers”, including “three generals”, are in the Kursk region, of which the Ukrainian army has occupied several hundred square kilometers since August. Neither Russia nor North Korea have confirmed the presence of this contingent.
