North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Friday appeared to acknowledge for the first time that the troops he sent to fight Ukraine for Russian President Vladimir Putin have suffered losses en masse.
In a ceremony depicting the faces of 100 North Korean soldiers and attended by their family members, Kim honored the "heroic" soldiers while he hugged children and appeared tearful.
Kim first acknowledged that he sent thousands of troops to fight for Putin in Russia’s Kursk region in April before then acknowledging there had been some deaths in early July when he was shown mourning over coffins with North Korean flags draped over them.
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But the ceremony on Friday is the first time he has acknowledged that more than a handful of soldiers were killed — though it is still only a fraction of the roughly 600 troops killed in the Kursk fight that South Korea’s intelligence reported earlier this year.
The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in April that of the 15,000 North Korean troops sent to fight in Russia, there were some 4,700 casualties.
"The combat activities of overseas operational forces... proved without regret the power of the heroic [North Korean] army," Kim said, according to East2West news service. "The liberation of Kursk proved the fighting spirit of the heroes."
Russian forces are assessed to have largely retaken Kursk after Ukraine launched a cross-border operation in Russia in August 2024, though reports confirm that fighting in the area persists as Ukrainian forces continue to engage with Russian forces in the region.
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The Ukrainian General Staff on Thursday said that Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), along with other unspecified Ukrainian forces, conducted long-range drone strikes against the Novoshakhtinsky Oil Refinery, which supplies Russian forces operating in Ukraine and is one of southern Russia’s largest oil product producers, processing some 7.5 million tons of oil annually, reported the Institute for the Study of War.
Up to 12,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk in the fall of 2024, before another 3,000 were deployed in early 2025 to counter Ukraine’s operation. It is unclear how many North Korean troops remain in the southwest Russian region.
Reports earlier this year suggested that North Korea may look to send additional troops to aid Moscow by the end of the summer, though it is unclear if any additional foreign soldiers have been deployed to Russia.
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On Friday, Kim suggested that North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine could be coming to a close and hailed the "victorious conclusion of overseas military operations."
Though it is also unclear if this means troops already deployed to Russia could also be returned home soon.
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