North Korean troops withdrawn from the front in the Russo-Ukrainian War

In October 2024 North Korean troops entered the fray. They were posted to the Kursk Region of Russia. In August 2024 Ukraine stunned the world by invading Russia and seizing thousands of square kilometres of the Kursk Region. This is a deep humiliation for Russia. For the first time in 80 years, another state had taken control of some Russian sovereign soil. When Germany did it in the 1940s Germany was at least a superpower. Ukraine is 10 times weaker than Russia by any metric and yet the Ukrainians managed to take control of some Russian land.

Russia is running low on troops and munitions. Russia has purchased shells from North Korea. The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK) as it is officially called is a communist state and most of its arsenal is of Soviet-era manufacture. Therefore, North Korean assets and munitions are compatible with Russian systems.

Since 1991 Russia has been largely indifferent to North Korea. However, the Ukraine War severely impaired Russia’s relations with much of the world. In 2024 Putin paid his second-ever visit to South Korea.

As I predicted at the start of the war, Russia sought to buy soldiers from North Korea. 20,000,000 North Koreans are largely slaves of the Kim dynasty. They are sent to be labourers in Russia’s most isolated and inhospitable regions. They are paid below the minimum wage. Much of their wage goes to the North Korean regime. If a North Korean gets three meals a day, he considers himself privileged.

Pyongyang and Moscow admitted that North Koreans were in Russia for military training. But they denied that they were fighting.

It is speculated that Moscow has given North Korea oil, food and technical know-how for its satellites in return for North Korean troops. North Korea is a control-freak society. Its troops are turned into automatons.

An estimated 10,000 North Koreans were sent to fight in Kusk. A further 100,000 were due to be sent it is rumoured. North Korea has a standing army of 1,000,000. They could afford to send a considerable minority of that to assist Russia.

The possibility of 100,000 or more North Korean troops being sent to fight was a grave worry for Ukraine. Russia has over 700,000 troops in Occupied Ukraine. Another 100,000 on top of that would have been a major boost to Russia.

Russia has lost around 800,000 killed, wounded and captured in this war. Admittedly one person can show up more than once in this data. If a soldier is wounded that counts as one wounded; if he recovers and is wounded a second time, then he shows up twice, but it is the same individual; if he recovers and goes back to the front and is killed, he shows up thrice.

Russia is about to start drafting men from Moscow because the manpower situation is so bad. Russia strove to avoid drafting Muscovites because they were richer, better connected, more educated and oppositional. Putin does not want to provoke mass demonstrations or mass emigration. Enormous financial incentives to volunteer are not working.

The North Koreans' task was to prevent Ukraine from penetrating any deeper into Russia and ideally to drive the Ukrainians out of the Russian Federation. The North Koreans have succeeded in the first task but failed in the second.

North Korea has not fought since 1953. Therefore, its current soldiers have no combat experience. The rigidity of its mindset means that tactics are very out of date. They do not understand that they can be seen by drones and thermal imaging even if they are hiding in forests. They have taken very heavy casualties.

The Ukrainians found it easy to inflict severe losses on the North Koreans. Russians provided the North Koreans with almost no air cover or artillery support.

Intercepted Russian communications revealed that many of them had a racist attitude towards the North Koreans. The Russians voiced their frustration about the lack of interpreters.

The PDRK is an extremely sadistic regime. It told its men to fight to the death. Those who are wounded must commit suicide. If they are captured by the enemy, then the families of these men back in North Korea shall be punished with extreme harshness. At first, the Ukrainians captured only two North Korean soldiers both of whom were badly wounded and soon died.

Later two unwounded North Koreans were taken by Ukraine. They were handed over to South Korean intelligence for interrogation. They may have been a mine of information for South Korea.

Ukraine has cordial relations with the Republic of Korea (South Korea). South Korea voted in the UN to condemn Russia’s illegal war of unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. South Korea has given financial and humanitarian aid. However, Seoul stopped short of providing military aid. This is partly because South Korean public opinion opposed it. They did not want to provoke Russia with whom until 2022 South Korea had a civilised relationship. Further, the South Koreans said they needed the military assets for themselves in case a war broke out against the North.

The PDRK has not admitted that its soldiers are fighting against the Ukrainians. Neither has Putin’s regime. Intercepted communications from the Russian Army reveal that Russia wishes to pretend that the PDRK troops are Buryats. The Buryat people are an indigenous ethnic minority from the Russian Far East. Because of their phenotype, the Koreans can easily be mistaken for Buryat. In the Korean War 1950-53, the Soviet Union sent troops to assist the communist side: of North Korea. The Soviets kept this top secret. So, they dispatched Buryats and pretended that they were Koreans.

In January 2025 the North Koreans were withdrawn from the frontline. Why? It could be that the losses were so high that Kim Jung Un considered it not worth continuing to fight. Perhaps it was that North Korea is dissatisfied with the aid that Russia was giving in return for the soldiers.