North Koreans ‘don’t understand what’s happening’ on the battlefield – with ‘several hundred’ casualties so far
North Korea has suffered “several hundred” casualties while fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine in the Kursk region, a senior US military official said this week.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said the figure included everything from “light wounds up to being KIA (killed in action)”, with soldiers of “all ranks” among the casualties.
Yesterday, Ukraine’s special forces said 50 North Korean soldiers had died in three days of fighting in the border region.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said as many as 10,000-12,000 troops from Pyongyang had been sent to fight in Ukraine.
‘They don’t understand what’s happening’
Kyiv’s forces have been able to distinguish North Korean troops from Russian forces on the battlefield due to them moving in large groups, a Ukrainian drone commander told The Washington Post.
“The North Koreans are running across the fields, and there are so many of them. They don’t understand what’s happening,” he said.
“I don’t know if they don’t understand what’s going on or if the Russians are deliberately sending them like that. I can’t say.”
He added that Ukrainian drones, artillery and other weaponry easily found their targets “because they were moving in the open field”.
“You can imagine the result,” he said.
“We were very surprised, we had never seen anything like it — 40 to 50 people running across a field.
“That’s a perfect target for artillery and Mavic (drone) operators. Russians never ran like that.”