After Months of Using Them as Cannon Fodder, North Korean Troops Are Pulled From the Front Lines

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.