The death toll is rising among North Korean troops sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine and the regime in Pyongyang has resorted to tried-and-trusted techniques of propaganda to guarantee loyalty from North Koreans.
Late last month, North Korean state media broadcast a documentary detailing the actions of troops serving in Ukraine, which did not shy away from the deaths of its military personnel.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, the program told of two soldiers — Yun Jong-hyuk, 20 and Woo Wi-hyuk, 19 — who found themselves surrounded but chose to kill themselves by detonating a grenade rather than be captured. The soundtrack described the young men’s deaths as “heroic sacrifices.”
While tales of brave soldiers sacrificing themselves for the motherland and young people urged to enlist in the military to become “bullet and bomb suicide squads” would fall on deaf ears elsewhere, analysts say the vice-like grip the North Korean government has over domestic media means that there are virtually no alternative narratives available to the public.
Rather than shy away from the soldiers’ deaths, Kim Jong Un has used them to his advantageKCNA/REUTERS
Propaganda to foster ‘absolute devotion’
“It’s what the North does: ideological indoctrination to educate both current soldiers and the next generation,” Min Seong-jae, a professor of communication and media studies at Pace University in New York, told DW.
The program depicted other similarly sacrificial suicides, which have become more prevalent since two injured North Korean soldiers surrendered to Ukrainian troops shortly after they were first deployed.
“They show footage of troops committing suicide because it fits squarely into the regime’s longstanding narrative of ultimate loyalty and sacrifice,” Min said.
North Korean news has also been awash with footage of leader Kim Jong Un bowing his head before portraits of dead soldiers and embracing grieving family members.
The North Korean regime is portraying fallen soldiers as heroic martyrsKCNA/KNS/AFP
Min says the images are designed to communicate his apparent anguish over their sacrifices.
“By broadcasting images of soldiers pulling grenades on themselves, the regime reinforces the message that absolute devotion to the homeland requires a willingness to die before surrender. The narrative is framed as heroic martyrdom, not senseless loss,” he said. “What outsiders see as horror, North Korea presents as proof of its soldiers’ unbreakable spirit.”
A message for Moscow
Two days after the documentary was aired, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) estimated that of the 13,000 soldiers deployed by Pyongyang to fight for Russia in its war in Ukraine, 2,000 have been killed.
But the regime is not just aiming its message at its domestic audience, Min says. Pyongyang is also keen to show its ally in Moscow that it is providing fearless comrades and strengthening their partnership.
And while such images in other, more open societies could undermine morale and “raise uncomfortable questions about why sons and brothers are being sent abroad to die,” Min points out that this is not the case in North Korea.
“The state’s tight control over information ensures these images carry a very different meaning,” he said. “They frame the death not as a loss but as a heroic martyrdom.”
Images of Kim Jong Un “weeping over coffins, consoling grieving families and presiding over solemn ceremonies” are used as “an opportunity to demonstrate the unity of the people.”
Punishment as propaganda?
Erwin Tan, a professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, has another theory: that the soldiers were forced to die by suicide after attempting to desert or performing poorly in battle.
“Such video coverage might have been intended to signal to other members of the North Korean military that ‘cowardice and incompetence’ will not be tolerated,” he said. “Another possibility is that they may have been instructed to commit suicide to ensure that, if captured, they cannot be interrogated, which would therefore reveal the extent of North Korean involvement in the war.”
The North Korean regime has long used propaganda and heavy-handed internal security services to demand loyalty from its citizens, primarily because it fears the sort of collapses that the former Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe experienced in the late 1980s, Tan said.
“The North Korean regime fully recognizes the fragility of its grip on power,” Tan said.
To maintain control, it has built a network of informants and internal surveillance agencies that would make it very difficult for an uprising to occur in the North.
Similarly, the regime has ensured that military leaders who might provide the only other source of resistance remain loyal, either by rewarding them with positions of influence or by purging those who might stand in the way.
Senior military officials are rewarded for their loyalty to the regimeYonhap/YONHAPNEWS AGENCY/picture alliance
A new feature of Pyongyang’s propaganda about the war in Ukraine are claims that the North’s troops intervened because the United States, Japan and South Korea had all committed units to the Ukrainian side.
It is an easy sell for a populace raised on unrelenting tales of the “evil deeds” and “mendacity” of the US, the “puppet state” in South Korea and Japan, which is described in state media as a “warmonger” that is planning to reinvade the Korean Peninsula.
“North Korean state media’s claim that its soldiers are fighting Americans, South Koreans, and Japanese serves to make a distant, confusing war feel immediate and ideologically consistent,” said Min.
He highlighted how Pyongyang has long taught its citizens that these three countries are their “eternal enemies.”
“So reframing the Ukraine war as another front in that same struggle transforms it from fighting on Russia’s behalf into a direct defense of the homeland.”
He explained that it “stirs familiar emotions of pride, revenge and resistance, and helps mask the uncomfortable reality that North Koreans are dying for Moscow’s interests rather than their own.”
Edited by: Karl Sexton