About 1,000 North Koreans have been killed fighting Ukraine in Kursk, officials say

Western officials have told the BBC that North Korean troops have already suffered almost 40% casualties in fighting in Russia’s western Kursk region in just three months.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that of the roughly 11,000 troops sent by North Korea, known as the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), 4,000 had been killed in combat.

This term includes those killed, wounded, missing or captured. Of the 4,000, about 1,000 are believed to have been killed by mid-January.

These losses, if confirmed, are intolerable to the North Koreans.

It is not clear where the wounded are being treated, nor even when and to what extent they will be replaced.

But the figures point to an extremely high price borne by President Vladimir Putin’s ally, who is close to Kim Jong Un, as he tries to help him expel Ukrainian forces from Russia ahead of possible ceasefire talks later this year.

Ukraine launched a lightning strike in Russia’s Kursk region last August, taking Russian border guards by surprise.

The government in Kiev made it clear at the time that it had no intention of keeping the seized territory, but simply using it as a bargaining chip in future peace talks.

Ukraine’s early successes at Kursk have since been steadily pushed back, in part due to the arrival of the North Koreans in Russia in October.

But Ukraine still holds several hundred square kilometers of Russian territory and inflicts huge losses on its enemy.

The North Korean troops, said to be from an “elite” unit called the Storm Corps, appear to have been thrown into the fray with relatively little training or protection.

“These are barely trained troops led by Russian officers who don’t understand them,” says former British Army tank commander Colonel Hamish de Breton-Gordon.

“Honestly, they don’t stand a chance. They are thrown into the meat grinder with little chance of survival. They are cannon fodder and the Russian officers care even less about them than they do about their own people.”

Reports attributed to South Korean intelligence say the North Koreans are unprepared for the realities of modern warfare and appear particularly vulnerable to being targeted by Ukrainian first-person-view (FPV) drones, a weapon that is a familiar part of the battlespace further south in the Donbas region of Ukraine for years.

However, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrsky, warned earlier this week that North Korean soldiers pose a significant problem for Ukrainian frontline fighters.

“They are numerous. An additional 11,000-12,000 highly motivated and well-trained soldiers leading the offensive. They operate based on Soviet tactics. They operate in platoons, companies. They rely on their numbers,” the general told the Ukrainian TSN Tzhdeny news program.