Their involvement has come at a heavy price. Intelligence officials in South Korea said about 300 North Koreans had been killed and about 2,700 wounded. In January the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted a clip showing two captured North Korean soldiers, one of whom said his commanders had told him he was being sent on a “training exercise”.
The North’s soldiers, who had not seen combat before being deployed, were said to have been unprepared for the harsh realities of warfare in unfamiliar terrain and particularly vulnerable to Ukrainian drones.
Intelligence officials in the South claimed notes had been found on dead North Korean soldiers indicating that the regime expected them to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner.
The arrival of North Korean troops triggered fears that the war could take a dangerous turn for Ukraine, amid claims by military officials in South Korea that the regime in Pyongyang was preparing to send even more troops.
Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington estimated this week that as many as half of the North Korean troops sent to Ukraine had been killed or injured in Russia’s “war of attrition”.
“The casualty rates were significant,” Jones said during a podcast appearance, according to the Yonhap news agency. “By most accounts we were able to take a look at somewhere between a third and probably on the real high end, maybe 50% casualties among the North Korean forces.