The capture of two North Korean soldiers definitively proves Pyongyang is sending military support to Russia.
North Korea has sent some 12,000 soldiers to join its Russian ally. | Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images
January 21, 2025 3:46 pm CET
KYIV — One of the North Korean soldiers recently captured by Ukraine first tried to commit suicide, but then asked to watch Korean romance movies, said the Ukrainian paratroops who captured him.
“He was already wounded in a battle, but remained relatively calm until the evacuation vehicle arrived,” one of the soldiers of the 95th assault brigade told the Ukrainian Airborne Forces’ press service in a video interview published on Tuesday. “We were escorting him to the road where there were some concrete pillars … and suddenly he ran and hit his head on the pillar.”
North Korea has sent some 12,000 soldiers to join its Russian ally in trying to expel Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region after Kyiv’s surprise offensive last August.
The North Koreans showed up on the battlefield in late October, and have since earned a grim reputation among Ukrainians for apparently preferring to kill themselves rather than surrender.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said North Korea has seen 4,000 dead or wounded soldiers since joining the war.
On Jan. 11, Ukrainian forces managed to capture two North Koreans alive; they were taken to Kyiv, where South Korea’s spy agency has been assisting, for medical treatment and interrogation.
Neither the Kremlin nor Pyongyang, which signed a limitless partnership treaty with each other last summer, have confirmed North Korea’s participation in the war against Ukraine. Kyiv has even reported Russians were instructed to burn the faces of dead North Koreans to make them difficult to identify.
That makes capture of the two North Koreans of enormous propaganda value to Ukraine. During video interrogations, published by Zelenskyy, the North Korean POWs said they were told they were being deployed to Russia for training and then fighting, and that they were issued fake Russian military IDs.
The Ukrainian paratroopers who captured both said they found one soldier wounded in a trench after a failed Russian assault on Ukrainian positions.
“He was lying there, with his head and an arm wounded. He had a grenade, a knife and a sausage on him. I asked him to drop everything, but he refused to drop the sausage because it was food, so we let him keep it,” a Ukrainian soldier said.
After the North Korean tried to kill himself by ramming his head into a pillar, the paratroops passed him on to another unit.
“He calmed down. Other soldiers treated his wounds and fed him. Later, he even asked to turn on romance movies for him in Korean,” said the soldier.