Kim Jong Un sent troops to help Russia \u201cannihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers\u201d of Kursk region<\/p>\n
Ukraine earlier said 4,000 of at least 10,000 North Koreans troops fighting with Russian for had been killed<\/p>\n
SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea confirmed Monday for the first time that it sent troops to Russia to support its war against Ukraine.
\nUS, South Korean and Ukraine intelligence officials have said North Korea dispatched about 10,000-12,000 troops to Russia last fall. But North Korea hadn\u2019t confirmed or denied its reported troop deployments to Russia until Monday.
\nLeader Kim Jong Un decided to send combat troops to Russia under a mutual defense treaty, the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers\u2019 Party said in a statement.
\nIt cited Kim as saying the deployment was meant to \u201cannihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers and liberate the Kursk area in cooperation with the Russian armed forces.\u201d
\n\u201cThey who fought for justice are all heroes and representatives of the honor of the motherland,\u201d Kim said, according to the statement sent to state media.
\nIn March, South Korea\u2019s military said North Korea sent about 3,000 additional troops to Russia earlier this year, after its soldiers deployed on the Russian-Ukraine fronts suffered heavy casualties. South Korea\u2019s Joint Chiefs assessed that around 4,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded.
\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier put the number of killed or wounded North Koreans at 4,000, though US estimates were lower at around 1,200.
\nIn March, Kim expressed his unwavering support for Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine during a meeting with a top Russian security official, Sergei Shoigu, in Pyongyang. State media reports said Kim and Shoigu reaffirmed their commitment to uphold the mutual defense treaty agreed upon last year. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko told Russian media the governments were discussing a potential visit by Kim to Moscow.
\nNorth Korea has been supplying a vast amount of conventional weapons to Russia as well. South Korea, the US and their partners worry that Russia could reward North Korea by transferring high-tech weapons technologies that can sharply enhance its nuclear weapons program. North Korea is expected to receive economic and other assistance from Russia as well.
\nNorth Korean soldiers are highly disciplined and well trained, but observers say they\u2019ve become easy targets for drone and artillery attacks on Russian-Ukraine battlefields due to their lack of combat experience and unfamiliarity with the terrain.
\nStill, Ukrainian military and intelligence officials have assessed that the North Koreans are gaining crucial battlefield experience and have been key to Russia\u2019s strategy of overwhelming Ukraine by throwing large numbers of soldiers into the battle for Kursk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kim Jong Un sent troops to help Russia \u201cannihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers\u201d of Kursk region Ukraine earlier said 4,000 of at least 10,000 North Koreans troops fighting with Russian for had been killed SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea confirmed Monday for the first time that it sent troops to Russia to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":80256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80258,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80241\/revisions\/80258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}