Ukraine said Saturday that it was questioning two wounded soldiers it claimed are North Koreans taken prisoner while fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region.
“Our soldiers captured North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region. These are two soldiers who, although wounded, survived and were brought to Kyiv, and are talking to SBU investigators,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media, referring to the country’s security service.
Kyiv did not present direct evidence that the men are North Korean and AFP was unable to independently verify the prisoners’ nationality.
Neither Russia nor North Korea has reacted to the claim.
The SBU said the men told interrogators they were experienced army soldiers, and one said he was sent to Russia for training, not to fight.
It released a video showing the two men in hospital bunks, one with bandaged hands and the other with a bandaged jaw. A doctor at the detention centre says the first man also had a broken leg.
Ukraine released no audio recording of the prisoners but said they were talking through Korean interpreters working “in cooperation” with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
Zelensky said Saturday that it was difficult to capture North Koreans alive because “Russians and other North Korean soldiers finish off their wounded” to cover up “evidence of the participation of another state, North Korea, in the war”.
He said he would provide media access to the prisoners of war because “the world needs to know what is happening”.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga wrote on X that the “first North Korean prisoners of war are now in Kyiv”, calling them “regular DPRK troops, not mercenaries”.
“We need maximum pressure against regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang,” he wrote.
The SBU claimed the men’s capture provided “indisputable evidence of the DPRK’s participation in Russia’s war against our country”.
It said one POW carried a Russian military ID card “issued in the name of another person” while the other had no documents. It showed an ID issued to a 26-year-old man from Russia’s Tyva region bordering Mongolia.
Ukraine has said Russia is hiding North Korean fighters by giving them fake IDs from regions such as Tyva with large ethnic minority communities. “The Russians are giving these Koreans their documents, but they are not fooling anyone,” Zelensky said.
One prisoner said he received the Tyvan ID in Russia in autumn 2024 when some North Korean combat units had “one-week interoperability training” with Russian units, the SBU said. The man said he believed he was “going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine”, adding that he was a rifleman born in 2005 and had been in the North Korean army since 2021.
The other man wrote his answers because of an injured jaw, saying he was born in 1999, joined the army in 2016 and was a scout sniper, the SBU said.
Update 20250112
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service on Sunday backed up Ukraine’s account of having captured two wounded North Korean soldiers this week in Russia, after Kyiv said they were being questioned.
The NIS similarly said one of the captured soldiers revealed during his interrogation that he received military training from Russian forces after arriving there in November.
“He initially believed he was being sent for training, realising upon arrival in Russia that he had been deployed,” the NIS said.
The soldier said North Korean forces had experienced “significant losses during battle”.
According to Seoul’s intelligence agency, one of the men “went without food or water for 4 to 5 days before being captured”.