North Korean Fighters Reported in Russia’s Kursk Region, Not Yet in Combat

North Korean troops said to be en-route to Russia’s western Kursk region to help the Kremlin’s forces to repel a Ukrainian invasion have not yet been spotted in combat, news reports said on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

The Ukrainska Pravda news outlet citing a Ukrainian military intelligence source said that as many as 3,000 of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) soldiers were travelling through Russia on their way to the Kursk sector, but that front line Ukrainian forces had yet to see them.

“Intelligence data is the same... there is still no combat contact,” the article said.

The state-financed Ukrinform news agency, citing other government sources, also said on Tuesday that an advance party from the North Korean contingent was in the Kursk region, preparing housing and training facilities for a main body of troops before they arrive.

“Soldiers from North Korea will be trained at a number of training grounds [in the Kursk region] and the transportation of [DPRK] personnel takes place mainly at night. North Korean officers and embassy representatives are arriving at the training grounds to act as translators and monitoring the mercenaries’ progress,” the report said.

The report went on to say that Ukrainian intelligence agencies have identified the training base locations, but do not know how long the training will last and when, or if, the North Korean brigade might be committed to combat against Kyiv’s forces.

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The Monday evening national news broadcast by Suspine Novyni reported the North Korean brigade might arrive in Kursk sector in force by the end of the month. Reports that Pyongyang and Moscow had agreed North Korea would send soldiers to Russia first surfaced in the Ukrainian media in June.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency HUR announced it had confirmed at least some of those troops were in the vicinity of the Kursk region, releasing a recording the agency said was between Russian service personnel discussing the movement of North Korean soldiers through their sector in unmarked, civilian registered trucks.

HUR said the officers in the Oct. 27 recording were members of the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade, whose deployment to the Kursk region has been confirmed and is in combat with Kyiv forces on the ground there. Kyiv Post could not independently authenticate the recording.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Monday that DPRK troop deployment to Russia was: “A dangerous expansion of the conflict… I can confirm that North Korean troops have been sent to Russia and North Korean military units have been deployed in the Kursk region."

 Rutte said NATO called on Russia and the DPRK to “stop these actions immediately.” 

Asked by reporters on Monday about the White House position on 10,000 North Korean soldiers entering the war in Ukraine on Moscow’s side, US President Joe Biden told a Delaware news station “Yeah, and you got…I dunno…It’s very dangerous, very dangerous, and the idea that Kamala’s [Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate] opponent [Donald Trump] is talking to Putin, and discussing what should be done, I mean, anyway…”

Pentagon spokesmen on Monday said that US intelligence believes 10,000 North Korean troops were in Russia, although one week before that, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby put the number at 3,000.

On the ground in the Kursk region, both sides reported combat engagements at scattered locations around the perimeter held by Ukrainian forces, with the hardest fighting in the town of Olgovka. Ukraine’s battle-tested 47th Mechanized Brigade, a unit armed with US-made Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles said it was conducting attacks in the sector, with a heavy attack drone presence over rear areas was widely reported.

Ukrainian military sources said that counterattacks over the past week had stabilized lines around an enclave inside the Russian region covering some 600-700 square kilometers (230-260 square miles). In the first month of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia Kyiv’s forces overran almost twice that are, but Russian counterattacks have pushed them back.

Russian military media claimed air strikes were wearing down Ukrainian formations. Russia’s Ministry of Defense aired images of Su-34 fighter bombers dropping glid bombs on targets inside Kursk region, and claimed Ukrainian forces were suffering heavy casualties on Sunday.

Some Ukrainian media on Monday took the national military leadership to task for launching an invasion of Russia and, they argued, putting defenses in the east of Ukraine in jeopardy.

“Nobody is even curious about it [the situation in Ukraine’s east]. What they want to do is report about Kursk. And defend Ukraine’s Donbas? Unfortunately, that’s not for them. Not Volodymyr Zelensky, the commander-in-chief, nor [army commander Lieutenant General] Oleksandr Syrsky, I don’t see any motivation to make that kind of effort, at all. And it just shocks the people in the army. Zelensky isn’t even going to Donbas any longer,” Ukrainian journalist Yurii Butusov said in his Monday evening Vblog.

Ukrainian Major General Dmitro Marchenko, declared a hero for his role in defensive operations in Ukraine’s south during the early months of the war, in an interview with the journalist Boris Bereza published on Monday, linked Kyiv’s ongoing incursion into the Russian Federation with recent relentless Russian advances deeper into Ukrainian territory.

“To go into the Kursk region, and then just to sit there, you have to understand, they [Zelensky and Syrsk]) threw the most combat-ready brigades into there. The strongest. The most powerful. Reinforcement for them goes faster than in the Kupiansk or in other sectors… you have to have the resources to do that. And you have to have a concept of what you are going to do next. Right now, I don’t understand what’s possible to do next. OK, we went in. We dug in. You think that Putin will trade Kursk region for our territory? That’s not going to happen,” Marchenko said.

“Perhaps our leadership has some ingenious secret plan, otherwise I don't understand why our best brigades are sitting in the Kursk region, but at the same time our defense in Ukraine is collapsing,” he said.

Syrsky responding to Moscow-controlled media reports that Ukrainian forces in Kursk region were being ground into bits said in an Oct. 25 statement that Russian troops have taken critical losses attempting and failing to eject Kyiv’s troops from Russia over the last three months.

He said that army intelligence had counted 17,819 Russian casualties in the Kursk region since Ukraine’s Aug. 8 invasion, of which 6,662 were killed, 10,446 were injured and 711 were taken prisoner. He set the amount of Russian army combat equipment knocked out or captured during battles in the Kursk region as including 45 tanks, 256 combat armored vehicles, 565 trucks or cars, 99 artillery systems and five artillery rocket systems.

Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region was controversial even before it kicked off, with the commander of one of the combat brigades deployed inside Russia, Colonel Emil Ishilkov, being sacked by Syrsky for opposing the operation on the grounds that troop strength was too low to hold the ground it would capture.

According to unconfirmed but widespread news reports, General Syrsky’s predecessor, the popular General Valerii Zaluzhny, was pushed out of the Ukrainian army top job in July because he, like Ishilkov, told Zelensky the Kursk operation was too much of a gamble. Zaluzhny resigned his post without stating the reason, later becoming Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain.