Ukrainian forces have reportedly engaged North Korean troops in Russia’s Kursk Oblast in the first known combat involving these units, according to a Telegram post on Monday by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation head Andriy Kovalenko.
According to Ukrainian military intelligence reports last week, approximately 12,000 North Korean soldiers, including 500 officers and three generals, have been deployed to Russia, with some units already positioned in the Kursk region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that he had told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were on “Russian training grounds in the immediate vicinity of the war zone.”
The U.S. also said last week that around 8,000 North Korean were stationed on the border with Ukraine.
On Wednesday South Korea’s military intelligence agency said that an advance unit of North Korean soldiers may have been sent to the front lines in support of Russia’s war effort against Ukraine.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Seoul informed South Korean lawmakers during a parliamentary audit that North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
The South Korean intelligence agency said it had no information to substantiate claims of North Korean casualties on the front lines. However, it said North Korean troops would face challenges due to unfamiliar terrain and differing methods of warfare.
“The war is being carried out in the form of a drone combat, but North Korean troops have not been supplied with drones and have not been trained accordingly, so we anticipate considerable damage,” the agency said.
This assessment of the difficulty faced by this military deployment by Pyongyang was supported by the British Government on Sunday, which said Russian and North Korean troops jointly fighting in Ukraine would very likely have problems working together along the front lines.
“Russian and DPRK forces would almost certainly experience interoperability difficulties having not previously carried out joint military exercises,” the U.K. Defense Ministry said in a post to social media, referring to North Korea by its official title, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Experts told Newsweek that coming from North Korea’s cutoff society, there may be issues with communication and working smoothly alongside Russian forces.
“Although North Korean troops are undergoing training in Russian military facilities in the Far East, differences in language, culture, training, and warfighting doctrine, could diminish the effectiveness of North Korean forces until they are better integrated with Russian units,” said Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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