North Korean troops pulled back from frontline after heavy losses, Ukrainian officials say
Kyiv, Ukraine CNN —
North Korean troops have not been seen on the frontlines in Russia’s Kursk region for several weeks, a Ukrainian military official said Friday, amid reports of mass casualties among Pyongyang’s forces.
“The presence of DPRK troops has not been observed for about three weeks, and they were probably forced to withdraw after suffering heavy losses,” a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko, told CNN.
It follows reports that some North Korean units have been pulled back from the frontlines after significant losses, according to Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.
About 12,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent to Russia, according to Ukrainian officials and Western intelligence reports, which say around 4,000 those troops have been killed or injured.
North Korean troops have been deployed to Kursk since at least November to repel Ukraine’s incursion in the southern Russian border region.
“We are still in the Kursk region… the Russian forces were not enough to push us out,” Ukrainian President Zelensky said last week at a speech in Davos, Switzerland. Zelensky noted that there were 60,000 Russian troops in Kursk and 12,000 North Koreans.
Zelensky also said that one-third of those North Korean troops had been killed.
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CNN has previously reported on the brutal and near-suicidal tactics of North Korean soldiers, who in some cases have detonated grenades rather than be captured by Ukrainian forces and have written pledges of allegiance on the battlefield to North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim