(Reuters) – North Korean troops deployed in Russia’s Kursk region are suffering heavy losses and being left unprotected by the Russian forces they are fighting alongside, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday.
Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, said Russian troops were sending the North Koreans into battle with minimal protection and that North Koreans were taking extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner.
“Their losses are significant, very significant. We see that neither the Russian military nor their North Korean overseers have any interest in ensuring the survival of these North Koreans,” he said.
“Everything is set up so that it is impossible for us to capture them. There are instances in which they are executed by their own forces. Russians send them into assaults with minimal protection.”
Ukrainian and Western intelligence reports say there are about 12,000 North Korean troops in Kursk, a Russian region on the border where Ukrainian forces are holding chunks of territory after staging an incursion in August.
Earlier this week, Zelenskiy said more than 3,000 North Koreans had been killed or wounded.
He said Ukrainian forces had managed to take a few North Korean soldiers prisoner “but they were severely wounded and it was not possible to save their lives”.
Zelenskiy said the Korean people “should not be losing their lives in battles in Europe. This is something that Korea’s neighbours, including China, can influence.”
“If China is sincere in its statements that the war should not expand, it needs to exert appropriate pressure on Pyongyang.”
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rod Nickel)
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