About 300 North Korean soldiers have been killed in the Ukraine war and about 2,700 others have been wounded, a South Korean lawmaker said today, citing Seoul’s intelligence agency.

Moscow’s ally Pyongyang has sent around 10,000 troops to fight alongside Russia in pushing back Ukrainian troops holding swathes of Russia’s Kursk region.

“Estimates indicate that the number of casualties among North Korean forces has exceeded 3,000, of which 300 (are) dead and 2,700 wounded,” lawmaker Lee Song-kwan told reporters after briefing members of parliament from the agency. information.

In December, Ukrainian President Zelensky said that nearly 3,000 North Korean soldiers had been “killed or wounded”, while Seoul put the figure at around 1,000.

“Cannon Fodder”

According to Lee, “notes found on dead soldiers indicate that North Korean authorities are applying pressure to they kill themselves”, even using “explosives” so that they are not “captured”.

South Korea referred to units considered “cannon fodder» and were probably sent so that exchanged for Russian technological assistanceas part of Pyongyang’s effort to strengthen and modernize the means of its armed forces.

According to the South Korean lawmaker, documents found on corpses reveal that North Korea benefited because some of the soldiers “hoped to join the Workers’ Party of Korea” — the only one in the country — or sought “to be given amnesty” after fighting.

This last element suggests that some were imprisoned in their country.

Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have officially acknowledged that North Korean troops have been deployed on Russian soil and are fighting Ukrainian forces.

Zelensky: “Prisoners will be exchanged with ours in Russia”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Saturday that two North Korean soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces and were being interrogated.

“Ukraine is ready to hand over Kim Jong Un’s soldiers to him if he can arrange an exchange with our fighters held in Russia,” Ukrainian President Zelensky said via X yesterday.

For those who “do not wish to return” to their homeland “there may be other possible options”, Mr. Zelensky: those who want to “tell the truth about this war in Korean will have this opportunity.”

The Ukrainian military intelligence service released a video yesterday — cited by the Ukrainian president in his post — showing the two captives in bunks — possibly a hospital — with bandages, one on the right arm, the other on the jaw.

South Korea’s military intelligence agency said one of them said during interrogation that he was trained by the Russian armed forces after arriving on Russian territory in November.

“At first he thought he had been sent for training, then (…) he understood that he had been deployed” to the front, according to the same source.