COMMENTARY: 7,000 North Korean soldiers fallen for Putin — and two prisoners who want to go South

The figures Pyongyang will never publish

More than 7,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded in the Kursk Oblast campaign between 2024 and 2025. This figure, confirmed by Ukrainian military intelligence and relayed by the Kyiv Independent and Channel News Asia, represents a massive haemorrhage for an army fighting on a theatre it had never known, for a patron it had never had. Kim Jong-un sent his men to die in the forests of Kursk, and Moscow used them as cannon fodder in the frontal assaults characteristic of current Russian tactics.

Two of those soldiers survived differently: captured in January 2025 by Ukrainian forces, they now find themselves at the centre of a diplomatic equation involving Kyiv, Seoul, and Pyongyang. What they have declared wanting — according to South Korean and Ukrainian diplomatic sources available as of July 1, 2026 — is to go to South Korea. What they will actually obtain remains to be determined. What their presence says about this war is already devastating.

Two men captured. Seven thousand killed or wounded behind them. And Pyongyang still sending soldiers while never acknowledging their existence. There is in this figure of 7,000 the entire logic of a regime that treats its own children as consumable resources.

A confirmed presence, a documented scale

The deployment of North Korean troops in Russia was officially confirmed by Ukrainian, American, and South Korean military intelligence during 2024. The first units were identified in the Kursk region during Ukraine's summer 2024 incursion, which had temporarily brought part of Russian territory under Ukrainian control. The North Korean soldiers were engaged in the Russian counter-offensives aimed at retaking that territory.

The documented losses of 7,000 killed or wounded cover approximately one year of intense fighting. This figure, from Ukrainian military intelligence, had not been independently confirmed by third-party sources as of July 1, 2026. Pyongyang has never officially acknowledged sending soldiers to Russia. North Korea maintains that its relationship with Moscow is technical and economic in nature — a claim contradicted by the two prisoners currently in Ukraine's hands.

A state that denies having sent soldiers to war even after two of them have been captured alive is a state whose state-level lying is so embedded it survives physical proof. That is Pyongyang in 2025.

Captured in January 2025, a diplomatic stake in July 2026

The two North Korean soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces in January 2025 represent a case without precedent in the recent history of armed conflict. They are the living, nameable, interrogable proof of the North Korean military presence in Russia. Their testimonies, extracts of which have been made public by Ukrainian authorities, detail the conditions of their deployment, their training in Russia, and the instructions they received.

According to South Korean diplomatic sources cited by the Korea JoongAng Daily during the visit of Ukraine's Foreign Minister to Seoul on June 30, 2026, the two men have expressed a wish to be transferred to South Korea. This wish, if genuine, is politically explosive: it would transform prisoners of war into asylum seekers from a regime allied with Russia. Pyongyang had not reacted publicly to this information as of July 1, 2026.

Two soldiers who want to defect to the South after being captured in combat for the regime that trained them — if that is not a political commentary on the nature of North Korea, I do not know what is.

Ukraine's first foreign minister in South Korea in eleven years

On June 30, 2026, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha made an official visit to Seoul — the first by a Ukrainian head of diplomacy to South Korea in eleven years. He met with his South Korean counterpart Cho Hyun. The discussions were described as "constructive" in official statements from both sides, the standard diplomatic formulation that leaves open the question of what was actually agreed.

Both governments indicated they had agreed to seek a solution to the transfer of the prisoners in accordance with their "free will" and international humanitarian law. This formulation does not constitute a concrete agreement. It signals a shared intention to resolve the issue, but no schedule, no modalities were publicly announced. Seoul wants the transfer as soon as possible. Kyiv is "weighing domestic public opinion," according to sources cited by the Korea JoongAng Daily.

Sybiha visits Panmunjom, looks at the demarcation line, and says: "this historic line is now physically linked to our own front lines." That is not a metaphor. It is a geography of solidarity between two democracies facing two neighbouring authoritarian regimes.

The demilitarised zone as seen from Kyiv

During his visit to Seoul, Andrii Sybiha travelled to Panmunjom, the demilitarised zone that has separated the two Koreas since the 1953 armistice. Before the cameras, he delivered a phrase that captures the geopolitical connection between the two conflicts: "This historic line is now physically linked to our own front lines." He was referring to the fact that soldiers trained behind this line are now fighting — and dying — in the forests of Kursk.

This statement is not merely symbolic. It aims to solidify cooperation between Seoul and Kyiv across several registers: intelligence sharing on North Korean military tactics, diplomatic cooperation at the United Nations and in international forums, and potentially the supply of South Korean military equipment to Ukraine — a subject on which Seoul remains cautious but no longer closes the door as firmly as it did in 2022.

Sybiha at Panmunjom is Ukraine telling the world: look at where Kim Jong-un's soldiers are going. They are going to die on our land. This war has ceased to be regional since the day Pyongyang signed its secret military agreement with Moscow.

The absence of reaction as an answer

The official reaction of Pyongyang to Sybiha's visit to Seoul, to the casualty figures published by Ukraine, and to the declarations on the prisoners: total silence. North Korea's official news agency KCNA published nothing on these developments as of July 1, 2026. That is itself an answer — and it is the expected answer from a regime that has built its stability on the capacity to control internal information.

This silence protects Kim Jong-un in several ways. It avoids having to explain to the North Korean population why soldiers are dying in a foreign country. It avoids the diplomatic embarrassment of a public disagreement with Moscow over the losses. And it maintains the plausible deniability that Pyongyang uses in international forums — notably at the UN Security Council, where Russia blocks any binding resolution on the issue.

Pyongyang's silence over the death of 7,000 of its soldiers is a crime against its own population, documented and recorded. The families of these men may never know. That is the definition of this regime: institutional forgetting as a tool of power.

The war as a North Korean military laboratory

Beyond the human figures, the North Korean deployment in Russia has a strategic value that military analysts are beginning to document. Kim Jong-un's soldiers have acquired real combat experience — under high-intensity warfare conditions, with drones, modern artillery, electronic warfare systems — that no exercise can replicate. This experience now resides in the minds of survivors. It will be integrated into North Korean military doctrine.

For South Korea, this operational skills transfer constitutes a direct threat. For Taiwan and Japan, it confirms that the Russia-North Korea coalition is not symbolic — it is militarily operational and being strengthened. American and South Korean intelligence services are analysing the survivors not only for what they say about the war in Ukraine, but for what they reveal about Pyongyang's future capabilities.

Putin gave Kim Jong-un the one thing no simulation can provide: the experience of real combat. That is the true payment of this alliance. Missiles and shells were the visible price. The combat competency acquired in Ukraine is the hidden strategic dividend.

What international humanitarian law provides

The fate of the two captured North Korean soldiers is governed by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. In theory, they must be treated with dignity, protected from pressure to reveal information beyond their identity, and repatriated after the cessation of hostilities. In practice, their status is unprecedented: they are citizens of a state not officially at war with Ukraine, sent by a regime that denies their presence.

The two men's request to go to South Korea creates a diplomatic precedent without clear guidance. International law does not explicitly provide for the case of soldiers clandestinely sent into a conflict by a third-party state not party to the conflict. Ukraine and South Korea are therefore navigating partially uncharted legal territory, where humanitarian law principles must be reconciled with the geopolitical realities of the Korean peninsula.

The precedent and its implications for North Korea

If the two prisoners are indeed transferred to South Korea, the established precedent will be immense. It would be the first time a North Korean soldier, sent in secret to fight in a foreign conflict, officially arrives in a state that Pyongyang considers its existential enemy. The revelations they could make — on command structures, agreements with Moscow, deployment conditions — would be of extraordinary intelligence value.

For Kim Jong-un, this transfer would represent an unprecedented public humiliation in decades. This is no doubt why Kyiv is "weighing domestic public opinion" before acting: the decision to transfer these two men will have consequences in multiple simultaneous directions, and none of them is trivial. The equation is complex, and both capitals know it.

These two captive soldiers may hold the keys to part of the secret architecture of the Moscow-Pyongyang axis. Kyiv and Seoul know it. That is why this transfer decision is political as much as humanitarian — and it is normal that it should be.

7,000 names no one will officially pronounce

These 7,000 North Korean soldiers killed or wounded at Kursk are the concrete reflection of what the war in Ukraine has become: a conflict where the lines between local and global, between regional and strategic, have been erased. Putin recruited the armies of a totalitarian state to compensate for his own losses. Kim Jong-un sold the blood of his men in exchange for technology and regime stability. This deal was struck in secret — but the evidence is accumulating.

The two prisoners who want to go to South Korea are, in this context, far more than two individual cases. They are the thread, when pulled, that could reveal part of the hidden architecture of this alliance. The governments of Seoul and Kyiv — who met on June 30, 2026 for the first time in eleven years at foreign minister level — have every interest in managing this file with intelligence, not just compassion. Every detail these two men hold is a piece of a geopolitical puzzle the entire world needs to see complete.

The story of these two captured soldiers is the story of this whole war in miniature: men used by regimes that sacrificed them, who now want to choose their own destiny. This freedom of choice — so fragile, so uncertain — is precisely what Putin and Kim Jong-un seek to crush. It must be protected.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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