TAIPEI, Taiwan – North Korea could lose all of its troops deployed to help Russia in its war against Ukraine in about three months, if the high casualty rate it has been suffering persists, said a Washington-based thinktank.
As many as 12,000 North Korean soldiers are in Russia to support its war against Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk, according to Ukraine and the United States – although neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has acknowledged this.
“North Koreans have likely suffered roughly 92 casualties per day since starting to participate in significant fighting in early December 2024,” said the Institute for the Study of War in its report on Thursday, citing casualty reports from Ukraine and South Korea as well as Russian military bloggers.
“The entirety of this North Korean contingent in Kursk Oblast may be killed or wounded in roughly 12 weeks [about mid-April 2025] should North Korean forces continue to suffer similarly high casualty rates in the future,” the institute added.
North Korean forces will likely continue to suffer a larger ratio of wounded to killed in action, and it is unclear if or when injured North Korean soldiers return to combat, the institute explained.
Ukraine reported on Jan. 4 an estimated 3,800 casualties among North Korean soldiers, saying they proved to be easy targets for Ukrainian drones since they were unfamiliar with the difficulties of drone warfare and were struggling to adapt.
South Korea estimated on Jan. 13 that more than 300 North Koreans had been killed and about 2,700 wounded.
The South’s top envoy to the United Nations, Hwang Joon-kook, said on Thursday that North Korean troops were being treated as “expendables” and as a “cynical” means of sustaining the North Korean regime, citing “inhumane” tactics on the front lines as one of the main reasons for casualties.
British daily The Times cited a Ukrainian military official as saying that North Korean soldiers sent to Russia were being used as “human mine detectors.”
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‘Strategic mistake’
NATO’s top official said that coordination between Russian and North Korean troops was virtually impossible, calling it a “strategic mistake,” pointing to the low effectiveness of the North Korean military and its high casualties.
“We know it’s about 11,000 soldiers that are in the Kursk region used by the Russians … They were wounded and killed, and actually they are used in a not very effective way, because there is a language problem with the Russians,” the chairman of NATO’s military committee, Adm. Rob Bauer, told a news conference on Thursday.
Pointing out a lack of coordination between Russians and North Koreans, he added that the North Korean troops were also not used in “very favorable positions by the Russians.”
“It is a huge change that North Korea, the most isolated country in the world, now suddenly is a player…that they are in Europe fighting for the Russians. It means that the Indo-Pacific is now suddenly connected to the European theater in a way that nobody thought possible. That has huge consequences,” he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned in early January of the possibility that North Korea could send up to half a million troops to aid Russia.
North Korea has an estimated 1.2 million soldiers in its armed forces, though they have barely any combat experience. It is known to instead often rely on its troops for building infrastructure projects.
Edited by Mike Firn.