14 hours ago
1
Communist dictator Kim Jong-un of North Korea held a welcome back ceremony for soldiers serving in the battlefield of the Russian invasion of Ukraine this weekend, acknowledging a regiment believed to have been helping clear landmines in which at least nine soldiers died.
North Korean state media identified the regiment in question as highly trained engineers rather than frontline soldiers, and Kim himself described their area of work being in Kursk, a Russian region that Ukraine counter-invaded last year in an attempt to end Russia’s ongoing hostilities against it.
Kim praised the returning soldiers for being “courageous and responsible all the time” and described them as working “a miracle” by “turning a vast area of danger zone into a safe and secure one in a matter of less than three months.” The remarks were in a speech published in English in full by the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
“Early in August you, engineers of the regiment, left for the Kursk region of the Russian Federation, which your comrades-in-arms had retaken at the cost of their lives, and you achieved brilliant results in the course of performing your combat tasks there,” Kim reportedly explained, addressing the returning fighters and an audience at the ceremony.
“As all of you, both officers and soldiers, displayed mass heroism overcoming unimaginable mental and physical burdens almost every day, you could work a miracle of turning a vast area of danger zone into a safe and secure one in a matter of less than three months,” he claimed. “Except the heartrending loss of nine lives, all the officers and soldiers of the regiment have returned to the motherland, and I express my thanks to you for this.”
“The armed villains of the West, armed with whatever latest military hardware they are, cannot match this revolutionary army with an unfathomable spiritual depth,” the dictator predicted.
The South Korean newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily reported on Sunday that the regiment in question had been deployed to Kursk “for missions such as mine clearance” as part of the greater Russian effort to colonize Ukraine. Citing “experts,” the newspaper suggested that the public praise for this particular group of soldiers dispatched to the Ukraine war theater was intended to show that North Korea’s interference in the war was successful and that Pyongyang was offering more than cannon fodder, but trained scientists. One such expert, Professor Lim Eul-chul of Kyungnam University, noted that the work Kim described was not “a simple construction task, but part of a strategic, high-difficulty military operation.”
Russia under strongman Vladimir Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, colonizing its Crimean peninsula, then escalated its support for pro-Russia separatists in the Donbass region into a full-scale “special operation” against Kyiv in 2022. Putin has since claimed to “annex” the entire Donbass region and the territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, continuing to attack Ukraine’s major cities regularly despite alleged ongoing “peace talks” brokered by the administration of President Donald Trump.
Putin visited Pyongyang in June 2024, signing a mutual defense agreement with Kim in the capital city. South Korean intelligence began documenting North Korean military involvement in the war in late 2024. The U.S. State Department also confirmed their presence in the Ukraine war theater in November 2024.
“Today I can confirm that over 10,000 DPRK [North Korean] soldiers have been sent to eastern Russia, and most of them have moved to the far western Kursk Oblast where they have begun engaging in combat operations with Russian forces,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said.
By January, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky published a video showing alleged North Korean soldiers captured on the battlefield.
The North Korean government has since confirmed sending soldiers to the battlefield, but not exactly how many. Some estimates suggest that Pyongyang has deployed as many as 15,000 fighters against Ukraine. In July, Kim Jong-un held a televised event to honor soldiers killed in Russia and Ukraine. The event, at a theater, featured Kim watching footage of himself crying and welcoming back the coffins of the fallen, draping them in North Korean flags.
A month later, Kim was praising his “heroic army” as the world’s best.
“Such a result has cemented its appellation and reputation as the most powerful army in the world, giving everyone a clear understanding of it. Our army is now doing what it ought to do and what needs to be done. It will do so in the future, too,” Kim claimed.
Ukraine’s intelligence service estimated in October that, in addition to offering soldiers, North Korea is meeting as much as half of Russia’s ammunition demand to keep the war going. Oleh Alexandrov, an officer of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (FISU), was quoted in the state media outlet Ukrinform as stating that Pyongyang was offering as many as “200,000–260,000 shells of 152 mm and 122 mm per month.” He suggested that Russia and North Korea were taking advantage of the war to “test and improve North Korean weapons on the battlefield.”
English (US)