
A North Korean soldier takes aim at a Ukrainian drone.
Widely considered “cannon fodder” with “the opportunity to defect” foremost in their minds when they were deployed last fall, North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russians against Ukraine have nevertheless impressed their opponents with their commitment, fitness and courage.
“They are young, motivated, physically fit, brave, and good at using small arms,” Lieutenant-Colonel Yaroslav Chepurnyi, a Ukrainian army spokesman, told Politico.
“They are also disciplined. They have everything you need for a good infantryman.”
They have even been blowing themselves up “when they see capture is in sight,” Chepurnyi added.
Some 12,000 North Korean troops were believed to have been dispatched in October by President Kim Jong Un to help Moscow’s forces push the Ukrainians out of territory they took in Russia. The Ukrainians have reportedly lost about half the 1,250 square kilometres they captured.
Kyiv launched one of its largest drone attacks of the war on Russian territory Jan. 14, 2025, and fired six U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ballistic missiles known as ATACMS, and six U.K.-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Russia said it shot down all the missiles and 146 drones.
U.S. and South Korean authorities say about a third of the North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded since joining the fight against Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk border region. The numbers are difficult to verify, as neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have confirmed North Korean troops are fighting.
Kim signed a mutual defence pact with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June 2024. It has been described as the countries’ strongest deal since the Cold War. It includes a clause that requires both to use “all available means” to provide one another with immediate military assistance in the event of war.
Yuriy Bondar, a soldier with Ukraine’s 80th Air Assault Brigade, said North Korean soldiers have extremely good physical training and have stable morale.
“The enemy does not surrender,” Bondar said in a Facebook post. “They eliminate themselves according to the same scheme, a grenade near the head, and go. Those [dead] who remain on the battlefield are doused with flammable liquid and burned.”

North Korean and Russian troops killed in Russia’s Kursk region lie side-by-side next to a destroyed tank.
Kim signed a mutual defence pact with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June 2024.
Drone footage taken in December shows two dozen North Korean soldiers slowly jogging toward the Ukrainian front line in clusters across an open, snow-covered battlefield in what witnesses described as “suicidal charges” not unlike those of the First World War. They didn’t try to seek cover, which was “like a dream for our mortars and machine-gunners,” a 35-year-old Ukrainian veteran who went by the name Vitaliy told The Times newspaper of London.
A drone video clip showed a line of what were said to be the bodies of Pyongyang soldiers lying in blood-stained snow alongside dead Russians after their unit was all but wiped out.
Vitaliy fought in the Battle of Bakhmut, in which waves of convicted Russian murderers and rapists were sent to their deaths. “The [mercenary] Wagner Group had a simple order: advance or die,” he said. “It looked like exactly the same thing for the Koreans.”
Lieutenant-Colonel “Leopard” of Ukraine’s 33rd (Big Cats) Battalion told The Times the North Koreans are also being used as “human mine detectors.” He said their lives are worth little to their higher-ups.
“The North Koreans have a ‘meat grinder’ strategy,” he said. “Where Ukrainians use a mine-clearing vehicle, they just use people.
“They just walk in single file, three to four metres from each other, if one is blown up, then the medics go behind to pick up the dead, the crowd continues one after another. That’s how they pass through minefields.”
Leopard said the North Koreans aren’t anywhere near as heavily armed as their Russian counterparts, but he predicted this will change the longer they are involved in the war.
They “use only small arms, machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, maximum—that’s the extent of their technology,” he said. “They do not use drones yet, only the Russians. But I suspect they are starting to learn this, and the longer the war drags on, the more likely they are to innovate.”

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy shared an image of a wounded North Korean reported captured in Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
“Even at the cost of my life, I will carry out the supreme commander’s orders without hesitation.”
If there was any doubt on the plight of North Koreans deployed to the Ukraine war, the diary of a North Korean soldier killed during fighting is explicit in its descriptions of their typical roles, describing how Pyongyang troops are being used as “drone bait.”
Released by Ukraine’s special operations forces, the dead man’s written notes include a pen drawing depicting a stickman soldier breaking cover to distract a Ukrainian drone while two fellow soldiers fire on it from hidden positions.
“When the bait stands still, the drone will stop and it will be shot down,” the soldier wrote, his words translated by The Wall Street Journal.
The drone-tapping instructions detail how the “human bait” should stand within seven metres of the intended victim, which will then be “neutralized with precision shooting.”
“They demonstrate psychological resilience,” wrote the Ukrainian, Bondar. “Imagine, one runs and attracts attention and the other from an ambush shoots down a drone with aimed fire.
“As one commander said, compared to the soldiers of the DPRK, Wagner mercenaries circa 2022 are just children. And I believe him.”

A dead North Korean’s diary drawing depicts a stickman soldier breaking cover to attract the attention of a Ukrainian drone while two fellow soldiers hide in the background to shoot it down.
[ Ukraine Special Operations Forces]
“Longing for my homeland, having left the warm embrace of my dear father and mother,” he wrote, “here on Russian land I celebrate the birthday of my closest comrade Song Ji Myong.”
He also professes his devotion to Kim: “Even at the cost of my life, I will carry out the supreme commander’s orders without hesitation.”
United Nations sanctions specialist Hugh Griffiths, former co-ordinator of the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea, predicted Kim’s troops will not be treated well by their Russian masters and will eventually “see the light, the lie.”
“They will realize this is a one-way ticket, so we will likely see desertions and defections.”

A second North Korean PoW is pictured with bandaged hands.
The South Koreans said one of the soldiers had admitted North Korean forces had suffered “significant losses” in battle.
Indeed, two North Korean fighters captured by Ukrainian forces on Jan. 11, 2025, and taken to Kyiv for medical treatment described appalling conditions among the ranks.
The soldiers speak no foreign languages, so Ukrainian special services were working with the South Korean spy agency, NIS, to communicate with them.
The South Koreans said one of the soldiers had admitted North Korean forces had suffered “significant losses” in battle. One claimed he had gone without food or water for five days before being captured.
The pair, the first North Koreans prisoners to survive, had been given fake Russian names and military documents.
The soldiers reportedly said they were experienced fighters. One told interrogators he had been sent to Russia to train, not fight. (Russian troops had been told they were on a training exercise before they invaded Ukraine in February 2022.)
One of the prisoners of war had no identity documents, while the other had a Russian military ID card said to have been issued in the name of a 26-year-old from Russia’s Tuva region, bordering Mongolia.
According to Ukraine’s SBU security service, he was a rifleman born in 2005 and had been in the North Korean army since 2021. The other wrote his answers due to a wounded jaw. Born in 1999, he said he had joined the army in 2016 and was a scout sniper.
“One of them has expressed a desire to stay in Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed in a statement Jan. 12, 2025. “The second one wants to return to Korea.”
Zelenskyy said his country’s forces were ready to transfer both PoWs back to North Korea in exchange for Ukrainian captives held in Russia.
Moscow declined immediate comment on the issue.
“We do not know what is true there,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “We continue to discuss the possibility of exchanges, which is not easy work…but for us the life of every Russian soldier is important.”
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