On January 11, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine had
captured two North Korean soldiers in Kursk on Jan. 9 and brought them to Kiev where they were being questioned. No North Korean soldiers had been caught before, Zelensky
explained, because “Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war.”
Zelensky
posted a photo of each of the captured North Koreans, with one claiming, through interpreters, that he had been a member of the DPRK army since 2021, and the other testifying in writing (since his jaw was injured) that he had been in a sniper-reconnaissance unit since 2016. A brief
video of the interrogation was released by Ukraine's Presidential Press Service, but the faces are blurred, the location blacked out, and the authenticity of the video has not been verified.
Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, suggests the Western
media should request that Kiyiv “produce these supposed North Korean prisoners for journalists to interview. If they do, then the issue is proved. If not, it will be a strong indication that these prisoners do not in fact exist.”
Then, just days after the announcement of the capture, Ukrainian and American officials announced that the North Korean forces were gone.
It was reported in the Western and Ukraine media as an embarrassment to both North Korea and Russia. The North Koreans, in essence, had to be pulled off the front lines because they had sustained such heavy casualties. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrsky
said that the number of North Korean soldiers had been reduced by half. Kim Jong Un, the BBC
reported, had incurred “an extraordinarily high cost” for helping Russian President Vladimir Putin push Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, and the Russians had supposedly
squandered the elite soldiers with a lack of coordination and by “sending them forth in waves across fields studded with land mines to be mowed down by heavy Ukrainian fire.”
There are inconsistencies in the story of their reported exit, too.
On January 30, the New York Times
reported that according to Ukrainian and American officials, North Korean troops “have not been seen at the front for about two weeks.” The next day, CNN
reported that, according to Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, they have “not been observed for about three weeks.”
But on January 22, BBC
cited General Syrsky as saying just that week that “North Korean soldiers were posing a significant problem for Ukrainian fighters on the front line.” Syrsky said that “11,000-12,000 highly motivated and well-prepared soldiers [were] conducting offensive actions.” That week began on January 19. But North Korean troops were said not to have been seen since two to three weeks before January 30: that would be January 9-16. Ukraine says the North Korean troops had not been seen since 3-10 days before that.
And cutting it awfully close, Zelensky claimed that the two North Korean soldiers were captured on January 9. But by January 31, CNN was already able to publish that the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces had said that no North Korean soldiers had been seen “for about three weeks.”
American officials have kept that ambiguity open with the evidence-free
claim that “the decision to pull the North Korean troops off the front line may not be a permanent one. It is possible that the North Koreans could return after receiving additional training or after the Russians come up with new ways of deploying them to avoid such heavy casualties.”
So, that rabbit — if it is a rabbit — can be pulled out of the hat again if needed. If North Korean troops really were in Kursk, and they really were wasted and decimated, then their presence didn’t justify the escalatory risk of granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S. supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory. If they really weren’t, then the whole affair was a sleight of hand to justify that decision.
this was confirmed by multiple native Korean speakers that the dialect was specifically North Korean.
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