North Korean troops pulled back from frontline after heavy losses, Ukrainian officials say
North Korean troops have not been seen on the frontlines in Russia’s Kursk region for several weeks, a Ukrainian military official said Friday, amid reports of mass casualties among Pyongyang’s forces.
“The presence of DPRK troops has not been observed for about three weeks, and they were probably forced to withdraw after suffering heavy losses,” a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko, told CNN.
It follows reports that some North Korean units have been pulled back from the frontlines after significant losses, according to Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.
About 12,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent to Russia, according to Ukrainian officials and Western intelligence reports, which say around 4,000 those troops have been killed or injured.
North Korean troops have been deployed to Kursk since at least November to repel Ukraine’s incursion in the southern Russian border region.
“We are still in the Kursk region… the Russian forces were not enough to push us out,” Ukrainian President Zelensky said last week at a speech in Davos, Switzerland. Zelensky noted that there were 60,000 Russian troops in Kursk and 12,000 North Koreans.
Zelensky also said that one-third of those North Korean troops had been killed.
It was previously reported on the brutal and near-suicidal tactics of North Korean soldiers, who in some cases have detonated grenades rather than be captured by Ukrainian forces and have written pledges of allegiance on the battlefield to North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
A commander with the 6th Special Operations Forces regiment, who did not want to give his name for security reasons, told CNN that while the North Korean soldiers are “all young, trained, hardy fighters,” they would have not previously faced drones in combat. “They are prepared for the realities of war in 1980 at best,” he said.
Another battalion serviceman told CNN the North Koreans had shown good marksmanship when shooting down drones from about a 100-meter distance, suggesting a high level of training in North Korea.
However, Russia appears to be using the troops as foot soldiers, using them to carry out mass ground assaults despite major losses in Kursk.
Ukraine has recently made advancements in Kursk, according to a battlefield update from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think-tank, on January 26. Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said earlier this week that Russian forces recaptured the Kursk region village of Nikolayevo-Daryino, which lies on the Russia-Ukraine border.
Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have officially acknowledged the presence of North Korean troops in Russia.
Last year, months before the deployment of North Koreans to Russia, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin signed a landmark defense pact and pledged to use all available means to provide immediate military assistance in the event the other is attacked.
The pact is the most significant agreement signed by Russia and North Korea in decades and has been viewed as something of a revival of their 1961 Cold War-era mutual defense pledge.
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