TAIPEI, Taiwan – North Korea could send an additional 20,000 to 25,000 troops to Russia, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, amid reports that North Koreans had been taken off the front lines in a contested Russian region after suffering heavy casualties.
About 4,000 of the up to 12,000 North Korean troops dispatched to Russia’s Kursk region late last year to help it in its war against Ukraine have been killed or wounded, according to Ukraine.
“While Russia may attempt to deploy an additional 20,000 to 25,000 North Korean soldiers, they have not yet arrived at Kursk,” said Zelenskyy, citing “information from various sources.”
In January, South Korea’s military said North Korea was accelerating preparations to send more troops to Russia amid an increasing number of casualties, while Ukraine believed the North’s additional support would mainly include missile and artillery troops.
Neither Russia nor North Korea has even acknowledged that North Korean troops are helping Russia in its war and information about them can not be verified but Ukrainian, U.S. and South Korean officials have reported that the North Koreans have been suffering heavy casualties battling Ukrainian forces who occupied Kursk last August.
Zelenskyy said North Korean commanders treated their troops as expendable “packages,” at times executing them to prevent them from retreating. He added that the North Koreans were “learning from this war” as they took part in “serious ground operations” and would take this new knowledge home.
“They are truly training under combat conditions. They are learning everything – how to work with drones, how to counter drones, how to hide from drone swarms, how to ensure drone destruction and how to use their own drones,” he said, warning that such transfer of knowledge would be dangerous for the United States and Indo-Pacific region.
Zelenskyy also added that the North Koreans had suffered heavy losses and had not participated in recent assaults on Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Uriane said earlier that the North’s troops were withdrawing from front lines for “retraining.”
South Korea’s main security agency said on Tuesday that North Korean troops in Kursk had not shown any sign of participating in combat since January, citing the large number of casualties as a possible reason.
Last week, a spokesperson of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces also confirmed that North Korean troops had not been seen in Kursk for about three weeks.
Separately, unidentified Ukrainian and U.S. officials told The New York Times that North Korean troops had been taken off the front lines after suffering heavy casualties.
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A Washington-based thinktank reported in January that North Korea could lose all of its troops helping Russia in about three months, if they continued to suffer the high casualty rate.
“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, citing 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 should North Korean forces continue to suffer similarly high casualty rates in the future,” the institute added, referring to mid-April.
The South’s top envoy to the United Nations, Hwang Joon-kook, also said in January 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.
The 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.”
Edited by Mike Firn.