North Korean troops pulled from Russian frontline amid heavy losses

The North Korean troops deployed to bolster Russian forces in the country’s embattled Kursk region in November appear to have been pulled back from the frontline amid heavy losses, The New York Times (NYT) reported on Thursday citing unnamed Ukrainian and US officials.

Around 11,000 North Korean troops were reportedly sent to fight alongside Russian soldiers amid the ongoing Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, but they have not been seen on the front for about two weeks, the NYT wrote, adding that, according to a Ukrainian official, disorganisation in their ranks had driven up casualties.

In mid-January the BBC put the North Korean death toll in Russia at around 1,000, with an estimated 3,000 more North Korean troops believed to have been wounded, gone missing or been captured.

Since their deployment to the frontline, the North Korean troops have been engaging in combat with little training or protection, the BBC wrote, citing former British Army tank commander Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who said they were being “thrown into a meat grinder with little chance of survival”, as Russian officers “care even less for them as they do for their own men”.

Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have officially acknowledged the presence of North Korean troops on the frontlines in the Kursk region, though earlier this month Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered to exchange two captured North Korean soldiers for Ukrainian prisoners of war being held by the Russian military.

Earlier in January, 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 down 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.