South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) said on Friday that Ukrainian forces captured an injured North Korean soldier who had been dispatched to support Russia's war effort, and that the man later died from his wounds.
The case marks the first confirmed capture of a North Korean in Ukraine, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
“Through real-time information sharing with an allied country’s intelligence agency, it has been confirmed that one injured North Korean soldier has been captured,” the NIS said in a statement.
The capture reportedly occurred in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have conducted incursions and seized territory, according to Ukrainian media outlet Militarnyi. The outlet did not specify when the capture took place.
A photograph purporting to show the injured soldier, described as gaunt and visibly wounded, circulated on the Telegram messaging app, the Yonhap news agency reported. Details of the soldier’s condition remain unclear.
North Korea’s involvement
According to Kyiv and Seoul, North Korea has sent up to 11,000 troops to bolster Russian forces, months after a mutual defense pact was signed by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has acknowledged the deployment, Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence agencies have identified many of the soldiers as members of North Korea’s elite Storm Corps, known for its training in sabotage and infiltration.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed more than 3,000 North Korean troops have been killed or injured in combat in the Kursk region.
He has also warned that the alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang heightens the “risk of destabilization” on the Korean peninsula.
Yang Uk, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, told the BBC: “For Ukrainians, it’s more beneficial to capture these North Korean troops and try to exchange them with Russians for Ukrainian prisoners of war.”
