Ukrainian forces captured two North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian troops in Russia's Kursk border region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday.
He made the comments days after Ukraine began pushing for new attacks on Kursk to retain territory captured in a lightning raid in August that resulted in the first occupation of Russian territory since World War II.
Moscow's counterattack has left Ukrainian forces stretched and demoralized, killing and wounding thousands of people and retaking more than 40 percent of the 984 square kilometers (380 square miles) of Kursk that Ukraine had seized.
“Our soldiers have captured North Korean soldiers in Kursk. These are two soldiers who, although wounded, survived, were taken to kyiv and are communicating” with the Ukrainian security services, Zelenskyy said in a post on the Telegram messaging application.
He shared photos of two men resting on cots in a room with bars on the windows. They both wore bandages, one around their jaw and the other around both hands and wrists.
Zelenskyy said capturing the soldiers alive “was not easy.” He claimed that Russian and North Korean forces fighting in Kursk have tried to conceal the presence of North Korean soldiers, even killing wounded comrades on the battlefield to avoid their capture and interrogation by kyiv.
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The Ukrainian security service SBU provided more information about the two soldiers on Saturday. In a statement, he said one did not have any documents, while the other carried a Russian military identification card in the name of a man from Tuva, a Russian region bordering Mongolia.
“The prisoners do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, so communication with them is carried out through Korean translators in cooperation with South Korean intelligence,” the statement said.
According to the SBU, one of the soldiers claimed that he had been told that he would go to Russia for training, rather than go to fight against Ukraine.
The agency said both men received medical care in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and are being investigated “in cooperation with South Korean intelligence.”
A senior Ukrainian military official said last month that a couple of hundred North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces in Kursk had been killed or wounded in battle.
The official was providing the first significant estimate of North Korean casualties, which came several weeks after Ukraine announced that Pyongyang had sent between 10,000 and 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in its nearly three-year war against its much smaller neighbor.
The White House and Pentagon confirmed last month that North Korean forces have been fighting on the front lines in mostly infantry positions. They have been fighting with Russian units and, in some cases, independently around Kursk.
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