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Ukraine has found “irrefutable evidence” of North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war against his country, president Volodymyr Zelensky said this week as he announced the capture of two North Korean soldiers.
The two men were reportedly captured during fighting in Russia’s Kursk border region, where the Ukrainian forces launched an incursion last August.
North Korea has deployed some 12,000 troops to aid Russia’s war effort, Ukraine has said, echoing assessments by American and South Korean intelligence agencies.
Kyiv previously claimed to have caught a North Korean soldier in Kursk on 27 December, but later said he had died of his wounds.
The two soldiers captured on Saturday were brought to Kyiv for interrogation.
Who are the captured soldiers?
Pictures released on social media by Mr Zelensky show two men resting on cots in a prison cell with bars over the windows. Both wear bandages, one around his jaw and the other around his hands and wrists.
Mr Zelensky did not give their names but the Ukrainian intelligence service claimed that one of them carried a Russian military ID card issued in the name of a person from the Tuva republic bordering Mongolia. The other man possessed no documents when he was captured.
Moscow was “trying to hide the fact these are soldiers from North Korea by giving them documents claiming they are from Tuva or other territories under Moscow’s control. But these people are actually Koreans, they are from North Korea,” the president’s office said, without offering any evidence.
Since the captured soldiers did not speak English, Russian or Ukrainian, they were interviewed with the help of a Korean translator, the Security Service of Ukraine said.
The soldier with the ID card purportedly said he was born in 2005 and was serving in the North Korean military as a rifleman since 2021.
The other prisoner answered his interrogators in writing due to a severe injury to his jaw. He purportedly said that he was serving in the North Korean army since 2016 as a scout sniper.
What have they revealed about the war?
One of the soldiers purportedly said during his interrogation that he had been told he was on a training exercise and did not know he was fighting the Ukrainian forces. The testimony was confirmed by the other soldier, the security service said.
The man claimed to have hid in a shelter during fighting and stayed there until he was found by the Ukrainians a few days later. His unit had suffered significant losses and food and water shortages for several days before his capture, he purportedly said. The unit had received a single week of training alongside Russian troops before being deployed to the frontline.
“This task was not easy,” Mr Zelensky said about the capture of the two men. “Usually, Russia and other North Korean military personnel finish off their wounded and do everything possible to ensure that no evidence of the participation of another state, North Korea, in the war against Ukraine is preserved.”
South Korea’s intelligence agency claimed to have found North Korean memos calling on its soldiers to kill themselves before capture by the Ukrainians.
What happens to the soldiers now?
Mr Zelensky said that he was ready to send the two soldiers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un if he were to facilitate a prisoner exchange with Russia.
“Ukraine is ready to hand over Kim Jong Un’s soldiers to him if he can organise their exchange for our warriors who are being held captive in Russia,” he said on X on Sunday.
“For those North Korean soldiers who do not wish to return, there may be other options available,” he added. “In particular, those who express a desire to bring peace closer by spreading the truth about this war in Korean will be given that opportunity.”
