Posted on 01/31/2025 4:55:32 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Starting last last year, North Korea sent a total of about 11,000 highly trained troops to fight in Ukraine on behalf of Russia. But after months of being used as cannon fodder for Putin's war machine, Ukrainian sources say the North Koreans have been pulled off the front lines in recent weeks.
The North Korean troops, sent to bolster Russian forces trying to push back a Ukrainian offensive inside Russia’s borders, have not been seen at the front for about two weeks, the officials said after requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive military and intelligence matters.
The arrival of around 11,000 North Korean troops in Russia in November caused alarm in Ukraine and among its allies in the West, who feared their deployment signaled a significant escalation in the nearly three-year-old war. But in just three months, the North Korean ranks have diminished by half, according to Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander.
How do you lose 5,000 men in three months? Previous reports have described North Korean troops who advance with no armored vehicles and sometimes with no body armor in order to be able to move quickly. They also have come up with a unique approach to dealing with Ukrainian drones.
The North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region are assigned their own patches of land to assault. Unlike their Russian counterparts, they advance with almost no armored vehicles in support.
When they attack, they do not pause to regroup or retreat, as the Russians often do when they start taking heavy losses, Ukrainian soldiers and American officials say. Instead, they move under heavy fire across fields strewed with mines and will send in a wave of 40 or more troops...
They have also developed singular tactics and habits. When combating a drone, the North Koreans send out one soldier as a lure so others can shoot it down. If they are gravely wounded, they have been instructed to detonate a grenade to avoid being captured alive, holding it under the neck with one hand on the pin as Ukrainian soldiers approach.
Ukrainians who have fought them say they are good fighters and brave but their tactics suggest they don't really expect to survive.
The North Koreans take many casualties, Andrii said, but keep sending new units.
“It’s just forward, forward,” he said. “It’s motivation, orders and strict discipline.”...
“It feels like they specifically came here to die, and they know it themselves,” said Oleksii, a platoon commander.
A North Korean defector and former soldier spoke to NBC News about the mindset behind this. He said the troops were being treated as "cannon fodder" and were essentially state-backed mercenaries.
Lee, 38, a North Korean defector and former soldier now living in South Korea, said it is “devastating” to see troops from the reclusive, communist-ruled North being sent abroad by leader Kim Jong Un, “only to then give up their youth for a land that is not even theirs but the foreign land of Russia.”...
Lee, who spent five years in the North Korean military, said the troops had been sent to Russia as mercenaries rather than soldiers, noting that they weren’t wearing their uniforms. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has said they were given Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons, along with forged identification documents.
“Even if they die there it does not matter, because North Korea sent them out without officially recognizing them,” Lee said. “They were sent there not to bring honor to the country, but to give up their lives and bring back lots of money.”
Everyone in North Korea has been brainwashed into a cult of personality. Even if they don't fully believe it, they have no other option but to go along with it because anyone who steps out of line in even the smallest way winds up in a network of gulags where people are starved and tortured for resisting the state. Lee, the defector mentioned above, says he hopes some of the soldiers sent to Russia will survive long enough to become defectors themselves.
As Paul Harvey used to say:
“And now the rest of the story”...
Whatever their training is, they just aren’t in the best of health based on reports of North Koreans who made it to the south and got operated on. They probably lack the comparative strength and endurance of a typical trained soldier of their supposed level.
They've been Pyongyanked
The poor slobs, is it possible for any of them to defect?
Leaflets need to be sent. Introduce them to the concept of fragging.
So much propaganda in this war. Don’t know what to believe.
There is a reason they kill themselves. They will either be sent to a labour camp to be worked to death or they will be executed to avoid news on the outside world from being spread. They were dead men walking.
https://www.dw.com/en/russias-war-in-ukraine-what-will-happen-to-north-korean-pows/a-71311726
“Ukrainian sources say”
...and just like that, the North Korean troops that no one ever saw go back to never been seen again.
Months of heavy close combat will chew up any force necessitating a withdrawal for rest and refitting.
Welp, this article is attribute to anonymous Ukrainian sources. Those sources have proven false too many times for me to believe anything they write.
Fake.
And the fact that NK will practice collective responsibility against their families and either kill them or jail them.
These really are some poor bastards forced by their Government to fight for another Government, fighting a really ugly WW1 style war, in a strange land, for nothing that can possible matter in the least to them
Yes, their families will be punished anyway. We should pray for the end of North Korea and pray for its quick end.
Well. That’s a shame.
How’s the weather?
“The game’s over, Zeepers.”
There’s this in the article: “highly trained troops”
How does the writer know this?
“We should pray for the end of North Korea and pray for its quick end.”
Right. You and what army? That would take a big war. When are you signing up?
God’s army?
I did say pray.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.