Photo: Telegram / Zelensky
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has proposed exchanging two North Korean soldiers who were captured in fighting in Russia’s Kursk region for Ukrainian prisoners of war being held by the Russian military.
Sharing footage of captured North Korean soldiers on X on Sunday, Zelensky said that Ukraine was “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”.
Zelensky said that “other options” would be sought for North Korean soldiers who did not wish to return home and who expressed a “desire to bring peace closer by spreading the truth about this war in Korean”.
South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on Monday that at least 300 North Korean soldiers deployed to fight alongside Russian troops in the Kursk region had been killed to date, while approximately a further 2,700 others had been injured.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) attributed North Korea’s “massive casualties” in the war to its soldiers’ “lack of understanding of modern warfare”, which, it said, included “useless” efforts to shoot long-range drones. It also said that to avoid their capture by the Ukrainian military, Pyongyang was encouraging its soldiers to commit suicide rather than surrender.
Last week, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) claimed that some 4,000 of the 12,000 North Korean troops sent by Pyongyang to bolster Russia’s war effort in October had already been killed or injured.
Since the AFU launched a surprise incursion into Russian territory in August, some 50,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers have been deployed to the Kursk region in preparation for a counterattack, The New York Times reported in early November.
