South Korean MP Lee Sung-kwon is categorical. Quoted by the BBC, he states that“at least one hundred North Korean soldiers were killed in Kursk” since the Pyongyang regime entered the war alongside Russia in Ukraine. Information coming from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea. There are also around a thousand wounded for a workforce of around 10,000 Pyongyang soldiers engaged.
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Last Tuesday, General Syrsky also affirmed that the North Koreans had suffered heavy losses at Kursk. The day before, Volodymyr Zelensky put forward a much higher figure for X. For the Ukrainian president, “3,000 North Korean soldiers” would have been killed. Ukrainian intelligence services announced their arrival in early November. At the time, the information was timely to justify, in the name of the internationalization of the conflict, the authorization granted to Ukraine by Joe Biden to use American long-range missiles to strike Russia.
France evokes “escalatory” action
Note that no visual evidence has yet come to formally corroborate the presence of such soldiers on the front. A number of photos have emerged on social networks purporting to show North Koreans in combat, without it being possible to assert that they were not Buryat, Yakut or other Asian ethnic groups from eastern part of the Russian Federation and present in numbers on the Ukrainian front since the start of the conflict.
Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense agreement that provides for “immediate military aid” in the event of assault. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte indicated at the beginning of the month that Russia supported North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for weapons, these proven, and soldiers sent to Ukraine. France, through the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, is talking about action “escalatory”.
