Seoul, South Korea — North Korea has sent more than 1,000 additional soldiers from the country to Russia so far in 2025 to be deployed in the war in Ukraine, South Korean military sources said Thursday.
“The North Korean troops were sent to Russia sometime in January and February,” military sources told the local news agency Yonhap, adding that they had detected signs that North Korea was preparing for more shipments.
These thousand soldiers are in addition to the nearly 11,000 North Korean troops that have already been deployed in the conflict.
The current location of these troops is unknown, the sources said, although South Korean officials have said Pyongyang troops have been deployed in occupied Kursk province, the front line. Seoul’s intelligence services said Thursday that they had detected the presence of more North Korean soldiers in that area since the first week of February.
South Korea’s national intelligence agency, which has been monitoring the activity of North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, had recently noted that the country’s troops had been absent from combat in the Kursk region since mid-January, probably due to numerous casualties.
South Korean intelligence estimates about 300 North Korean soldiers have died in Ukraine and that about 2,700 have been wounded.
A North Korean prisoner of war recently interviewed by a South Korean media outlet reportedly said he was unaware that he was going into combat in Ukraine when he was deployed and that he was led to believe that he was fighting South Korean soldiers in the region.
The deployment of North Korean troops to Russia comes within the framework of the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement reached by North Korean and Russian leaders Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin in June 2024, which includes a mutual defense clause.
Under the pact, North Korea has provided Russia with tens of thousands of containers loaded with artillery, missiles and other conventional weapons that have been used in the war in Ukraine, and the deployment of soldiers since October.
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