North Korean troops resort to suicide amid capture of first POWs by Ukraine
- 19 January, 10:58
North Korean troops fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine are restoring to extreme measures to avoid capture. According to evidence from the battlefield, intelligence reports and testimony of captured soldiers, some North Korean soldiers chose to self-detonate and commit suicide to avoid becoming prisoners of war.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces on Monday shared an incident of a North Korean soldier blowing himself up with a grenade after Ukrainian soldiers approached him during a fighting in Kursk region. “The special forces eliminated 17 DPRK soldiers. One North Korean soldier had set an unsuccessful trap for the rangers of the 6th Regiment and blew himself up with a grenade,” the post on X social media reads. The incident added to the mounting evidence that Pyongyang troops are taking such drastic measures to avoid capture.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced in early January that his army had captured two North Korean prisoners of war. According to Ukrainian and Western estimates, Pyongyang has deployed some 11,000 soldiers to support Moscow's forces in Russia's western Kursk region after Ukraine’s cross-border incursion in early August, that marked the largest-scale incursion into Russian territory since WW 2.
Last month, Western sources reported that over a hundred North Korean soldiers were killed or wounded in Kursk region. Russia has not denied deployment of North Korean troops in its territory, while Ukraine’s Western allies have described Pyongyang’s involvement in the war as the major escalation of the conflict. Last months, Zelenskiy made shocking remarks, claiming that Russians were burning and disfiguring the faces of the killed North Korean soldiers in order to hide casualties among them. Experts link high number of casualties among North Korean soldiers to the lack of training among them, in comparison to battle-hardened Ukrainian troops.
