SEUL (Reuters) – After a battle this week in Kursk, a snowy region in western Russia, Ukrainian special forces searched the bodies of more than a dozen dead North Korean enemy soldiers.
Among them, they found one still alive. But as they approached, he detonated a grenade, blowing himself up, according to a description of the fighting published on social media by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces on Monday.
The forces said their soldiers escaped the blast unhurt. Reuters was unable to verify the incident.
But the case is among growing evidence from the battlefield, intelligence reports and defector testimonies that some North Korean soldiers are resorting to extreme measures in support of Russia’s three-year war against Ukraine.
“Self-detonation and suicides: this is the reality of North Korea,” said Kim, a 32-year-old former North Korean soldier who defected to South Korea in 2022, asking to be identified only by his surname due to fear of reprisals against his family, who remained in the North.
“These soldiers who left home to fight there have been brainwashed and are really ready to sacrifice themselves for Kim Jong Un,” he added, referring to the reclusive North Korean leader.
Kim, introduced to Reuters by the Seoul-based human rights group NK Imprisonment Victims’ Family Association, said he had worked for the North Korean military in Russia for around seven years until 2021 on construction projects to earn foreign currency for the regime.
Ukrainian and Western assessments say that Pyongyang has sent around 11,000 troops to support Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, which Ukraine seized in a surprise incursion last year. More than 3,000 were killed or wounded, according to Kiev.
North Korea’s mission to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moscow and Pyongyang initially dismissed reports of North Korea sending troops as “fake news”. But Russian President Vladimir Putin in October did not deny that North Korean soldiers were currently in Russia, and a North Korean official said that any troop deployment would be legal.
This week, Ukraine released videos of what it said were two captured North Korean soldiers. One of the soldiers expressed a desire to remain in Ukraine and the other to return to North Korea, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“One Last Bullet”
North Korea’s sending of men to Russia is its first major involvement in a war since the Korean War of 1950-1953. North Korea would have sent a much smaller contingent to the Vietnam War and the civil conflict in Syria.
The United States has warned that the experience in Russia will make North Korea “more capable of waging war against its neighbors”.
North Korea’s leader has previously extolled his army as “the strongest in the world”, according to state media. Propaganda videos released by the regime in 2023 showed bare-chested soldiers running across snowy fields, jumping into frozen lakes and punching blocks of ice for winter training.
However, a South Korean parliamentarian briefed by the country’s spy agency said that the number of North Korean soldiers injured and killed on the battlefield suggests that they are unprepared for modern warfare, such as drone attacks, and may be being used as “cannon fodder” by Russia.
Most worryingly, there are signs that these troops have been instructed to commit suicide, he said.
“Recently, it was confirmed that a North Korean soldier was in danger of being captured by the Ukrainian Army, so he shouted for General Kim Jong Un and pulled out a grenade to try to blow himself up, but was killed,” said Lee Seong-kweun, who sits on the South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee.
Memos uploaded by dead North Korean soldiers also show that the North Korean authorities emphasized self-destruction and suicide before capture, he added.
When asked about further details of the cases he referred to, he refused to go into detail, saying that it was information from Ukraine shared with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The NIS did not return calls seeking comment on Tuesday.
The suicides of soldiers or spies not only demonstrate loyalty to Kim Jong Un’s regime, but are also a way of protecting their families who have stayed at home, said Yang Uk, a defense analyst at the Asan Institute of Policy Studies.
Ukraine’s Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Kiev is ready to hand over captured North Korean soldiers to leader Kim Jong Un if he can facilitate the exchange for Ukrainians held captive in Russia.
For North Korean soldiers, however, being captured and sent back to Pyongyang would be seen as a fate worse than death, said Kim, the North Korean defector and former soldier.
“Becoming a prisoner of war means treason. Being captured means you are a traitor. Saving one last bullet, that’s what we’re talking about in the military,” he said.