– It is true that Korean is spoken in the indoor environment, says Eunah Kim, assistant professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University.
– I don’t speak any Korean, says Gabriel Jonsson, docent at the same department for Asian and Middle Eastern studies.
It was on October 17 that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a conference in Brussels sounded the alarm that Russia wants to send 10,000 North Korean soldiers to Ukraine.
The day after notifies South Korea’s intelligence that North Korea has decided to send 12,000 soldiers to the war in Ukraine. That same day, the first clips of what are alleged to be North Korean soldiers in Russia begin to circulate on Telegram.
Disagree about the language
The place where the clip takes place can be quickly identified by several users as a Russian military facility just over 20 miles from the Russian-North Korean border.
The question is whether, based on the images, it can be established that the soldiers seen are North Korean. The sound is of low quality and the speech is difficult to distinguish.
Of six experts contacted by SVT Verifierar, two say they can hear Korean.
– It’s North Korean dialect, says Inja Herzegh Han, translator at SVT.
“Growing Desperation”
On October 23, the United States says it has information that 3,000 North Korean soldiers have been transferred to Russia.
“We do not yet know whether these soldiers will participate in combat alongside the Russian military, but this is undoubtedly a very troubling possibility,” said John Kirby, the White House spokesman for national security.
Kirby, meanwhile, sees the move as a potential sign of weakness from Russia.
– If North Korean soldiers go into battle, it would show Russia’s growing desperation in the war against Ukraine. Russia suffers extraordinary losses on the battlefield every day, he says.
On Thursday afternoon, Ukraine’s military intelligence service stated that the North Korean soldiers had already been deployed in battle in the Kursk region, but there is currently no visual evidence of this.
See the review of the images in the clip above.