North Korean troops have begun clashing with the Ukrainian army in Russia's Kursk region. Andriy Kovalenko, director of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation, wrote this Monday, November 4 on Telegram that “ the first North Korean troops have already come under fire in Kurshchyna », in the Kursk region. This is the first time a Ukrainian official has reported that North Koreans are on the front lines.
In recent weeks, South Korean and US intelligence revealed that North Korea would send up to 12,000 troops to help the Russian army. An unprecedented support since the start of the war and which greatly worries Seoul. An American ambassador to the UN also warned that North Korean soldiers would leave “ necessarily in body bags » if they entered Ukraine to support Russia.
“The Russian army lied to us”
But if the presence of these soldiers at the front has not been confirmed earlier, a video has been agitating social networks since this weekend. It shows an allegedly North Korean soldier seriously injured in a makeshift hospital. His face is bandaged and bloody. The authenticity of this video, first shared by the pro-Ukraine Telegram account “ExileNova”, cannot be confirmed but two South Korean media outlets, The JoonGang and Le journal de Seoul, consider it reliable in particular because of the North Korean accent of the injured person.
« The Russian army lied to us that we would not be attacked and would never participate in the front lines. However, the Russian army recklessly forced us to participate in the offensive during the Battle of Kursk. Russia did not conduct any reconnaissance before the attack and did not provide us with weapons to defend ourselves “, said this soldier, barely audible.
“The heads were cut off by shrapnel”
« When Ukraine started to attack, all 40 people in our unit were killed, including my friends Hyeok-cheol and Gyeong-hwanhe continued, adding that he was the only survivor. Heads were cut off by shrapnel and I was able to survive by hiding under the corpses of my comrades. » He also stated that he saw “ mountains of corpses of Russian soldiers and destroyed defense positions ».
On Wednesday October 30, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that North Korean troops in Russia had not yet participated in the fighting but were preparing to do so in Kursk.
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