Both dreamed of traveling the world. Their first trip was summed up in the hell of the battlefield. Paek, 21, and RI, 26, are the two unique North Korean soldiers captured by kyiv’s troops on the war front led by Russia in Ukraine for more than three years. THE Wall Street Journal was able to question the two men, detained in the Ukrainian capital, exclusively. The two young soldiers, very little prepared in the conditions of the Ukrainian war, had joined the units sent by Pyongyang in the Russian region of Koursk, at the end of 2024.
An area where kyiv has led many incursions to try to pressure Moscow. In total, around 10,000 soldiers of the Asian regime were reportedly sent to this territory in reinforcement from the Russians. Neither of the two North Koreans captured was aware that he was going to fight for Moscow. “I did not know that I was going to Russia. I only learned it when I arrived there,” explains Paek to the American newspaper, in an article published this Friday, February 28. Russian uniform, military identity papers, assault rifle … Upon arrival, everything is done to transform it into a real soldier acting on behalf of the army of Vladimir Putin. He and Ri follow a training given by Russian forces. The functioning of enemy drones is taught in particular.
Lie about the presence of South Korean soldiers at the front
Paek and RI were sent to Russia on the orders of their military superiors, while they followed the long mandatory military service for all the inhabitants of North Korea. During this period, their training is coupled with intense brain washing sessions, during which young conscripts spend hours assimilating the maxims of the diet. Their dedication to the dictator Kim Jong-un, whose family has reigned for decades on the country, is total. To motivate the troops, the North Korean military executives make recruits believe that soldiers of the South Korean rival-the supreme enemy of Pyongyang-are present on the front alongside the Ukrainians. In other words, according to this narrative, more than for Russia, it would be above all to take up arms to defend North Korea.
An ideology noted in a letter directly addressed by Kim Jong-un to the North Koreans who left to fight and found by the Ukrainians on the body of a deceased soldier. The leader compares them to real heroes. “You experience the painful sacrifices and the joy of the triumph during costly victorious battles. Real camaraderie is the solemn emotion of patriotism”, it is written in this letter, always reported by the prestigious New York media. Result: arriving on the front in Koursk, young men are ready to do anything so as not to disappoint their nation. “I was fighting as if Russia was my motherland,” said Ri. “I don’t know why, but I was not afraid.”
First deployed en masse, the North Korean troops were finally withdrawn from the fighting by the Russian staff. According to Volodymyr Zelensky, 4,000 soldiers from these ranks have already been killed or injured since their arrival last fall. According to his story, Paek was captured by the soldiers after being seriously touched the leg during artillery and Ukrainian drones. The Ukrainian soldiers, who had the order of bringing some of these soldiers alive to question them, then took care of him. Like RI, the only survivor of an assault on his group, he was then taken to detention in kyiv. Paek tells that he did not have time to commit suicide before being captured, as the North Korean military doctrine wants.
New redeployments noted
The soldier specifies that he was not paid to fight in Koursk. “I do not know if the Russians and the Ukrainians fight for money. But we have received nothing to participate in the war. There is nothing to obtain from this. It was an order, so I fought,” he simply describes to the journalist who interviews her from his cell in the Ukrainian capital. Orders that neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have for the moment mentioned publicly, since the two countries refuse to confirm the presence of North Korean soldiers within the framework of the war in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, North Korea does not seem to have abandoned its support for Russia in the matter. On Thursday, a source of South Korean intelligence told AFP that Seoul had gone back to the battlefield of soldiers from the country. “The North Korean army, after an lull of about a month, was redeployed on the front line in the Koursk region […] And a few additional deployments of troops seem to have taken place “in recent weeks, she develops. A sign that relations do not seem to have cooled between the two allies, Russian president Vladimir Putin also maintained Thursday at the Kremlin with a Party Party Party of Kim Jong-Un.