KYIV: Ukraine said Saturday that investigators were questioning two wounded North Korean soldiers after they were captured in Russia’s Kursk region, saying they provided “indisputable evidence” that North Koreans were fighting for Moscow.
It is not the first time that Kyiv has claimed the capture of North Korean soldiers during its Kursk incursion but it has not reported being able to question any before.
In December it said it took several captive but they died from serious wounds.
“Our soldiers captured North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region. These are two soldiers who, although wounded, survived and were brought to Kyiv, and are talking to SBU investigators,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.
The SBU security service gave some details of the men’s interrogation, saying both described themselves as experienced soldiers and one said he had been sent to Russia for training, not to fight.
But Ukraine has not provided any evidence that the men are North Korean.
In video released by the SBU, two men with Asian features are shown in hospital bunks, one with bandaged hands and the other with a bandaged jaw. A doctor at the detention center says the second man also has a broken leg.
Pyongyang has deployed thousands of troops to reinforce Russia’s military, including in the Kursk border region where Ukraine mounted a shock incursion in August last year.
Zelensky had said in late December that Ukraine had captured several seriously wounded North Korean soldiers who later died.
He said Saturday that it was difficult to capture North Koreans fighting because “Russians and other North Korean soldiers finish off their wounded and do everything to prevent evidence of the participation of another state, North Korea, in the war against Ukraine.”
He said he would provide media access to the prisoners of war because “the world needs to know what is happening.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga wrote on X that the “first North Korean prisoners of war are now in Kyiv,” calling them “regular DPRK troops, not mercenaries.”
“We need maximum pressure against regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang,” he wrote.
The men do not speak Russian or Ukrainian and communication is through Korean interpreters, the SBU said, adding that this was “in cooperation” with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
The SBU video does not show the men speaking Korean. AFP reporters in Seoul have contacted the NIS for comment.
The SBU said the men’s capture provided “indisputable evidence of the DPRK’s participation in Russia’s war against our country.”
It showed a Russian army ID card issued to a 26-year-old man from Russia’s Tyva region bordering Mongolia.
The SBU said that one POW carried this military ID card “issued in the name of another person” while the other had no documents at all.
Some reports have said Russia is hiding North Korean fighters by giving them fake IDs.
The SBU said the man with the Tyvan ID had told them he was given it in Russia in autumn 2024 when some North Korean combat units had “one-week interoperability training” with Russian units.
The man said he believed he was “going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine,” the SBU said.
The man said he was a rifleman born in 2005 and had been in the North Korean army since 2021.
The other man wrote answers because of an injured jaw, saying he was born in 1999, joined the army in 2016 and was a scout sniper, the SBU said.
The SBU said the men were captured separately — one on Thursday — by special forces and paratroopers.
They are being provided with medical care and “held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the SBU said.
Russia’s army said Saturday that it had gained territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region northwest of the logistics hub of Kurakhove, which it claimed to have captured Monday.
The defense ministry said troops had “liberated” Shevchenko, a rural settlement about 10 kilometers (six miles) northwest of Kurakhove.
Shevchenko, a large village, is located west of the reservoir near Kurakhove and “is necessary to take under control, to protect the town from shelling,” the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.
“Now Russian troops can move further toward the western border of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” it said.
Russia claims to have annexed the Donetsk region, which it refers to as the Donetsk People’s Republic, though it does not control the whole region.
Ukraine has not confirmed the loss of Kurakhove, which had around 18,000 inhabitants before Russia launched its 2022 offensive.
The Ukrainian military’s General Staff said Saturday that troops had stopped Russia’s offensive actions in the area, including around Kurakhove.
Russia is also moving close to taking the vital frontline city of Pokrovsk north of Kurakhove.
Donetsk’s regional governor Vadym Filashkin said Saturday that one person had been killed and another wounded in Pokrovsk over the last day.
In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a Russian drone attacked a car in a village near the front line, killing a 47-year-old woman on the spot, its governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine says questioning 2 captured North Korean soldiers
https://arab.news/c4h3u
Ukraine says questioning 2 captured North Korean soldiers
- “Our soldiers captured North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media
- The SBU security service gave some details of the men’s interrogation, saying both described themselves as experienced soldiers
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
