North Korean Troops "Blowing Themselves Up" To Avoid Capture In Ukraine

The incident is the latest documentation of the lengths the North Korean troops are willing to go to avoid capture and become prisoners of war to be presented as proof of Pyongyang and Moscow's blatant military alliance.

15 Jan 2025, 03:29 · www.ndtv.com

Kyiv:

After an intense battle with Russian forces this week, Ukrainian special forces were scouring dead bodies from the snowy western terrain of the Kursk region, where they discovered corpses of over a dozen North Korean enemy troops. Among them, they found one soldier was still alive.

But as Ukrainian soldiers approached him, the lone North Korean detonated his own grenade, blowing himself up to avoid being captured, Ukraine's Special Operations Forces said in a post on X, describing the intense fighting in the occupied Kursk region.

According to Kyiv officials, their soldiers escaped the blast uninjured, but the suicide incident added to mounting evidence from the battlefield, intelligence reports and testimonies of defectors that some North Korean soldiers are resorting to extreme measures as they support Russia's three-year war with Ukraine.

'Soldiers Being Brainwashed'

The incident is the latest documentation of the lengths the North Korean troops are willing to go to avoid capture and become prisoners of war to be presented as proof of Pyongyang and Moscow's blatant military alliance. The "brainwashed" Hermit Kingdom troops, who are being told it is treason to be taken prisoner, are posing a new challenge for Ukraine, officials said.

"Self-detonation and suicides: that's the reality about North Korea," Kim, a 32-year-old former North Korean soldier who defected to the South in 2022, told Reuters.

"These soldiers who left home for a fight there have been brainwashed and are truly ready to sacrifice themselves for Kim Jong Un," he added, referring to the reclusive North Korean leader.

Kim had reportedly worked for North Korea's military in Russia for about seven years up until 2021 on construction projects to earn foreign currency for the regime. According to him, for some North Korean soldiers, being captured and sent back to Pyongyang would be seen as a fate worse than death.

"Becoming a prisoner of war means treason. Being captured means you are a traitor. Leave one last bullet, that's what we are talking about in the military," he said.

Kim's claims were confirmed by Lee Seong-kweun, who sits on the South Korean parliament's intelligence committee. He said that recently, memos were recovered from dead North Korean soldiers showing that authorities at home have emphasized self-destruction and suicide before capture.

"Recently, it has been confirmed that a North Korean soldier was in danger of being captured by the Ukrainian military, so he shouted for General Kim Jong Un and pulled out a grenade to try to blow himself up, but was killed," Lee told Reuters.

Ukraine's North Korea Charge

Ukrainian and Western assessments say Pyongyang has deployed some 11,000 soldiers to support Moscow's forces in Russia's western Kursk region, which Ukraine seized in a surprise incursion last year. More than 3,000 have been killed or injured, according to Kyiv.

Moscow and Pyongyang initially dismissed reports about the North's troop deployment as "fake news". But Russian president Vladimir Putin in October did not deny that North Korean soldiers were currently in Russia and a North Korean official said any such deployment would be lawful.

Ukraine this week released videos of what it said were two captured North Korean soldiers. One of the soldiers expressed a desire to stay in Ukraine, and the other to return to North Korea, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

Zelensky said Kyiv is ready to exchange those soldiers with Kim Jong Un if he agrees to push for the freedom of Ukrainian POWs in Russia.

The Ukrainian President has gone as far as to claim that able-bodied Russian and North Korean troops scour the frontlines to finish off wounded Pyongyang troops to avoid their capture.

He even shared photos online showing the two men on bunks in holding cells, the younger with both his hands bandaged and the older one with his head wrapped because of a jaw injury.

North Korea's deployment to Russia is its first major involvement in a war since the 1950-53 Korean War. North Korea reportedly sent a much smaller contingent to the Vietnam War and to the civil conflict in Syria. North Korea's leader Kim has previously hailed his army as "the strongest in the world".

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