KYIV: A wounded North Korean soldier captured by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region has told interrogators that Pyongyang’s troops fighting for Moscow are suffering serious losses, official video published on Monday (Jan 20) showed.
Ukraine has captured two North Korean soldiers in the border region and has posted videos of their interrogation, with one speaking on camera about his experiences.
Moscow has not acknowledged the deployment of Pyongyang’s forces to fight in the Kursk region, as confirmed by Seoul and Washington.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday posted a video of a young soldier lying in bed saying there had been many casualties after he entered the battle on Jan 3.
He was responding to a question about the number of dead and wounded among his comrades.
In a previous video, the young man said that he hid in a dugout when he saw comrades dying during an offensive on Jan 3 but was himself injured and captured two days later.
In the video posted on Monday, he said he served in a reconnaissance unit and while some North Korean soldiers had been trained to use Russian military equipment, but he had not.
He said he was brought to Russia from North Korea in what he believed was a cargo vessel with around 100 others. They were then transported by sleeper train, he said.
The soldier said he was conscripted to the military aged 17 and had been serving since then.
He repeated a claim from a previous video that he had not known he was being sent to Russia to fight.
