EDITORIAL: Kim Jong-un Rewrites History — Soldiers Dead in Russia, Heroes in the Textbooks

Introduction: The Textbook as a Weapon of Propaganda

The official rewrite of June 2026

In June 2026, the Russian Military History Society — a state body — confirmed that Russian school history textbooks would be amended to include the participation of North Korean soldiers in combat in the Kursk region. Mikhail Myagkov, the Society's scientific director, stated it plainly: "The participation of North Korean soldiers in the operation to liberate the Kursk region — that will of course be added." These soldiers will be presented as heroes of the special operation. The textbook will be updated to reflect the "new realities" of the war that Vladimir Putin personally commissioned from his adviser Vladimir Medinsky, to be completed in five months. The same textbook that calls Ukraine an "ultra-nationalist state" and erases the last fifty years of its independent history.

This is not an administrative detail. It is an act of state. For the first time in decades, a government is printing into its children's memory the image of a foreign military ally sent to die in its war. North Korea deployed approximately 14,000 to 15,000 soldiers to Russia beginning in autumn 2024. According to Ukrainian intelligence, at least 6,000 of them were killed or wounded in the fighting on the Kursk front. These young men — many of whom likely did not even know where Ukraine was before they were deployed — will now become heroic figures in the history textbooks of 10th and 11th grade students in Russia. That is the logic of authoritarian regimes: turning the dead into arguments.

Soldiers Who Were Not There, Then Were There, Then Became Heroes

From denial to glorification in 18 months

The evolution of Russian messaging on North Korean soldiers is a textbook case in state propaganda. In autumn 2024, when the first North Korean contingents began arriving in Russia, Moscow denied their existence. Then, when Ukraine captured two living North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region in January 2025 — named Ri and Baek — and those soldiers publicly expressed their desire to go to South Korea, the reality of the deployment became undeniable. South Korea, through its intelligence agency, confirmed the figures. In April 2026, Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov personally presented Pyongyang with Orders of Courage for North Korean soldiers' "bravery and heroism." By June 2026: textbook.

The precedent of the third edition

This textbook is not entirely new. Its third edition for 10th and 11th grade classes had already been flagged in January 2026 as due to include the causes of the "special operation" and an account of the meeting between the Russian and American presidents in Alaska in August 2025. It is a propagandistic instrument in constant evolution, updated in real time to cover events in a war the Kremlin can no longer hide but can still frame. The section on North Korean soldiers will be accompanied, according to Myagkov, by sections on the use of drones, new weapons, and "new tactics" — a modernisation of the war narrative for new Russian generations.

The 6,000 Dead at Kursk: Numbers, Not Names

What Ukrainian data indicates

The figures on North Korean casualties come from verifiable sources. The Kyiv Independent, citing Ukraine's military intelligence agency, reported this week that more than 7,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in fighting in the Kursk region — the 2024–2025 campaign in which Ukrainian forces temporarily occupied part of Russian territory before withdrawing. Earlier estimates cited roughly 6,000 casualties (killed and wounded) based on South Korean data. These figures are operational estimates, not certified tallies — but they are consistent across sources.

What Pyongyang knows and what it says

North Korea has officially communicated no casualty figures. Pyongyang maintains absolute control over information on its deployed soldiers. Do families in North Korea know their sons have died in Ukraine? Probably not — not through official channels. North Korean soldiers had been instructed, according to reports, to take their own lives rather than allow themselves to be captured. Kim Jong-un praised the fallen soldiers in April 2026 for their "heroic suicidal combat and sacrificial explosions." The language of ultimate sacrifice, transformed into national glory. That is precisely the narrative framework that will now feed Russian school textbooks.

The Two Prisoners of War and the Question of International Law

Ri and Baek: two soldiers who want to go to South Korea

Since January 2025, two North Korean soldiers — designated as Ri and Baek — have been held by Ukraine. They are the first confirmed North Korean prisoners of war of this conflict. Both men have publicly expressed their desire to go to South Korea — an act which, under South Korean constitutional law, would make them South Korean citizens. One of them told South Korean broadcaster MBC: "If I am not taken to South Korea, I will end up dying." This is not an ordinary asylum request. It is a statement made under the pressure of a forced return that could mean execution.

The foreign ministers' meeting in Seoul on June 30

On June 30, 2026, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha in Seoul. Their exchanges on the North Korean prisoners of war were described as "constructive" by the South Korean government. Cho indicated on X that both parties had agreed to seek a solution consistent with international law and humanitarian principles, "respecting the wishes of the individuals concerned." Seoul reaffirmed its opposition to any forced repatriation of these soldiers to North Korea or Russia. That position is aligned with Article 12 of the Geneva Convention, which requires prisoners to be transferred to a state capable of applying the Convention.

Kim Jong-un's Plenum of June 20–22, 2026

North Korea declares its nuclear status "irreversible"

On June 20, 21, and 22, 2026, Kim Jong-un presided over the second enlarged plenum of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party. The statements that came out were direct. Kim reaffirmed the principle of "continuous strengthening of nuclear forces" and called for "exercising its position as a nuclear state." The phrase "irreversible" nuclear state is not new — it has been embedded in North Korea's constitutional law since 2022 — but its reaffirmation in this June 2026 plenum sends a clear message to stakeholders at the NATO summit scheduled in Ankara on July 7 and 8.

The fortification of the inter-Korean border

In his speech at the June 23 plenum, Kim Jong-un also pushed for the "fortification of the southern border." This is the implementation of his concept of two hostile states on the Korean Peninsula — a doctrine that formally rejects any possibility of reunification and positions South Korea as a foreign enemy entity. This fortification has been accompanied by additional force deployments along the inter-Korean Military Demarcation Line (MDL), according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Meanwhile, North Korean military engineers sent to Russia — approximately 1,000 in August 2025 for demining operations in Kursk — have been joined by contingents of drone specialists.

What Russia Pays and What It Receives

Military technology transfer to Pyongyang

The Russia–North Korea alliance is asymmetric but mutually beneficial in the short term. North Korea provides troops and ammunition — artillery shells in particular. Russia provides in exchange something Pyongyang values above all else: military technology. Ukrainian intelligence reported on June 20, 2026 that Russian technological improvements had reduced the margin of error of North Korean KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles from several kilometres to between one and five metres. That is a revolution in the precision of Pyongyang's ballistic arsenal. A missile that used to miss a military base can now destroy it.

Pyongyang's financial gains from the conflict

On the financial side, the Korean Institute for Defence Analysis estimated that North Korea had received more than 20 billion dollars in military and technological transfers from Russia since the conflict began — a figure covering weapons, equipment, and technology. More conservative CIA estimates put the figure at 7 to 13.8 billion dollars. In all cases, it is a considerable windfall for an economy under severe sanctions. Pyongyang is thus funding its own nuclear and conventional programmes with the human resources it sends to Moscow. A macabre transaction: lives exchanged for the technology of death.

Glorification in Museums and Ceremonies

A memorial museum inaugurated in Pyongyang in April 2026

The rewriting of Russian school textbooks is not an isolated act. It is part of a coordinated campaign to glorify North Korean soldiers who died in Russia. In April 2026, a memorial museum dedicated to soldiers deployed in Russia was inaugurated in Pyongyang. The ceremony was held under the auspices of Kim Jong-un, with senior Russian military officials in attendance. Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message describing the fallen North Korean soldiers as heroes whose exploits "would remain in the heart of every Russian citizen."

The mechanism of the 2024 Strategic Partnership Treaty

This joint glorification apparatus operates within the framework of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty signed in 2024 between Moscow and Pyongyang. That treaty provides for mutual assistance in the event of aggression against either signatory — which gave Kim Jong-un the domestic legal cover to deploy his troops to Russia. Both regimes have built a shared narrative: Ukraine is the aggressor, Russia is defending its territory, and North Korea is answering the call of a partner besieged by the West. It is an entirely false narrative — but it is the narrative Russian children will learn in school.

The Repatriated Prisoners: The Silence of Procedure

Neither prisoner in the February 5, 2026 exchanges

On February 5, 2026, a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine had taken place. 314 people regained their freedom in that exchange. But neither Ri nor Baek was on the list. The two North Korean soldiers remained in Ukrainian custody. Their cases raise a precise legal question: can Ukraine transfer them to South Korea without going through a formalised exchange with Russia or without North Korea's agreement? Legal experts say yes — Article 12 of the Geneva Convention and the principle of non-refoulement permit transfer to a third state capable of guaranteeing Convention-compliant treatment, provided the prisoner expresses this freely.

The political obstacle between Kyiv and Seoul

In practice, the decision is as political as it is legal. Ukraine must weigh the diplomatic impact of a transfer to South Korea on its relations with countries that maintain ties with Beijing — China being a crucial partner of Pyongyang. South Korea, for its part, has stated it would accept all North Korean prisoners who wish to come to its territory — including beyond the two already captured. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun indicated after his June 30 meeting that "progress is expected" if the political will exists on both sides. That is diplomatic language for: the solution is known, the decision has not yet been made.

What the Propaganda in the Textbooks Says About the War's Expected Duration

Inscribing the war into future generations

School textbooks are not written for immediate current events. They are written for the next generation. By inscribing North Korean soldiers, new drone tactics, and the "heroes of the special operation" into the curricula of 10th and 11th grade students, Russia is sending a clear message: this war is not a parenthesis. It is foundational. It will be taught as a just war, won with faithful allies, against Ukrainian "Nazi-ists" and their Western masters. The children who read this textbook in 2027 will be between 15 and 17 years old. In three to five years, they will be of conscription age.

The manufacturing of a war identity in Russia

This is what regimes that settle in for the long term do: they reformat collective memory. The unified Russian history textbook — written in five months on Putin's orders, co-signed by Medinsky — is not a history book. It is a civic formation document designed to produce a generation that will view the war in Ukraine as a historical necessity and its North Korean allies as brothers-in-arms. That is why the West must understand that supporting Ukraine is not merely a foreign policy choice of the moment — it is a decision about which version of history Russian children will learn in ten years.

What Democracies Must Understand About This Alliance

Understanding the Moscow–Pyongyang axis as a structural alliance

The West long treated the Russia–North Korea alliance as a situational arrangement, driven by Russian ammunition shortages. The events of June 2026 show that diagnosis was insufficient. The alliance is structural: a treaty, military deployments, technology transfers, joint glorification, shared memory. Pyongyang is not merely selling shells to Moscow — it is sending troops, sharing ballistic technology, and building a common historical narrative with Moscow. It is an alliance between two permanent war states that reinforce each other.

The democratic response: supporting Ukraine without equivocation

The most effective response to this Russian school propaganda, the most concrete response to the sacrifice of North Korean soldiers dead at Kursk, the most just response to the desire for freedom expressed by Ri and Baek — it is the same response. Support Ukraine with weapons, funding, and sustained diplomatic engagement. Sanction North Korea for its military transfers. Accept the prisoners who request asylum. And refuse to let democracies stand by while authoritarian regimes write history alone. What happens in Moscow's school textbooks today will be fought on the battlefields of tomorrow.

The Legacy of This Alliance for Global Security

The proliferation of North Korean missiles improved by Russian technology

The military technology transferred from Russia to North Korea will have lasting effects well beyond the war in Ukraine. North Korean KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles going from a margin of error of several kilometres to one to five metres precision represents a transformation that directly concerns the defence plans of South Korea, Japan, and American bases in the region. This technology will not disappear when the war in Ukraine ends. It will remain in Pyongyang's arsenal for decades to come. It is one of the most dangerous legacies of this conflict for global security.

The wider axis: Russia, North Korea, Iran, China

The Moscow–Pyongyang alliance does not operate in isolation. It fits within a broader axis that includes Iran — supplier of Shahed drones to Russia — and a China that profits economically from sanctions being bypassed by Moscow without directly exposing itself. These four powers do not form a formal bloc, but they share a common interest: the erosion of the rules-based international order that Western democracies have built since 1945. The question is whether democracies are aware of the scale of this systemic challenge and prepared to meet it with the same coherence that their adversaries bring to it.

Conclusion: The History We Choose to Teach

Two narratives for one war

There are now two versions of this war being written in parallel. In Russian school textbooks: a special military operation, defensive, victorious, conducted with heroic allies including North Korean soldiers who fell with "honour." In the archives of democracies: an illegal invasion, documented, condemned by an overwhelming majority at the United Nations General Assembly, carried out with mercenaries and foreign soldiers recruited by a partner dictator. These two versions are not equivalent — one is verifiable, the other is manufactured. But in authoritarian regimes, it is the manufactured version that will be repeated, year after year, to millions of students.

What Ukraine represents, at its core

Ukraine is fighting for a stake that goes beyond its own borders: the right of states to exist according to their own choices, the right of individuals not to be conscripted into a neighbouring dictator's war, and the right of history not to be rewritten by those who unleashed the violence. Zelensky has said it in many ways. The soldiers holding the lines illustrate it with their bodies. And somewhere in a Ukrainian detention facility, Ri and Baek — two young men who perhaps did not know where Ukraine was two years ago — are waiting for someone to decide their fate. Their freedom or their death will say something about all of us. About the capacity of democracies to do what their children's textbooks will one day teach as a moral victory.

What Kim Jong-un's Textbooks Will Never Say

The families waiting for a son who will not return

In North Korea, there is no free press, no public record of military casualties, no independent Red Cross to notify families. Somewhere in apartments in Pyongyang, Hamhung, or Chongjin, families are waiting for sons who were sent away "for training" and will not come back. They probably do not know their sons died on the Kursk front lines against a Ukrainian army defending its own land. The school textbooks will not say it. The North Korean government will not say it. Only history — the real kind, the kind archives eventually reveal — will say it one day.

The question Russian educators will never ask their students

Myagkov said the textbooks would cover "new tactics" and "new weapons" used in Ukraine. He did not say the textbooks would address the Ukrainian children deported to Russia — for which the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Putin for precisely that reason. He did not say they would address the Ukrainian civilians killed by strikes on cities. He did not say the textbooks would ask students why Korean soldiers, trained to defend the Korean Peninsula, ended up dying on the plains of Kursk. Those questions will have no section in the textbook. That is precisely why they matter.

What Seoul and Kyiv Are Building Together

A bilateral relationship born from war

The June 30, 2026 meeting between Ministers Cho and Sybiha in Seoul illustrates something that would have seemed improbable in 2021: Ukraine and South Korea now have a direct shared strategic interest. Both countries face authoritarian regimes armed with nuclear warheads, willing to violate every norm of international law, and backed by opaque alliances with regional destabilising actors. North Korea and Russia now share military infrastructure, arms contracts, technology transfers, and a joint memorial museum. Seoul and Kyiv, for their part, share something more fundamental: the existential threat of a nuclear-armed neighbour that denies their right to exist.

The decisions that create precedents

What Seoul and Kyiv decide about North Korean prisoners Ri and Baek will set a precedent. If Ukraine transfers them to South Korea in accordance with their wishes, it will demonstrate that international humanitarian law can prevail over geopolitical pressure. If they are returned under pressure to Russia or North Korea, it will send a different message — that individual survival can be sacrificed on the altar of diplomatic negotiations. This is not an isolated case: it is a test of democracies' consistency between their human rights rhetoric and their actions in concrete cases.

Conclusion: History Cannot Be Rewritten — It Must Be Proven

Putin's textbooks against the archives of reality

Russian propaganda can rewrite its school textbooks. It can erect statues, inaugurate museums, hand out medals. But it cannot erase the archives, the testimonies, the satellite images, the statements of captured prisoners. It cannot erase the fact that Ri and Baek — two North Korean soldiers — said on camera that they wanted freedom, not to be sent back. It cannot erase the United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning the Russian invasion by an overwhelming majority since 2022. Propaganda has an expiry date. The truth has an unlimited shelf life — if we preserve it.

What we owe the generations who will read history

In ten years, in twenty years, historians will write about this period. They will recount how North Korean soldiers were sent to die in Ukraine. How democracies chose — or chose not — to take them in. How Russian textbooks manufactured heroes out of the dead. And they will judge the actors of 2026 by their actions, not their intentions. Ukraine resists. Democracies are supporting it — insufficiently at times, but genuinely. Russia rewrites. North Korea gives its sons. Putin and Kim Jong-un are building together a world they hope to impose by force. It is up to democracies to decide whether they accept the role of spectator, or whether they choose to be the ones who shape the outcome.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Sources and method

This editorial draws on verifiable, dated sources. Data on Russian school textbooks comes from UA.NEWS, Meduza, and EU Pravda (June 2026), citing Mikhail Myagkov of the Russian Military History Society directly. North Korean casualty figures (6,000 to 7,000 killed or wounded) are drawn from the Kyiv Independent, the CIA, and South Korean intelligence, as documented by ISW and Free Malaysia Today (June 30, 2026). The Cho–Sybiha meeting of June 30 is confirmed by South Korean diplomatic sources cited by ANews and Hankyoreh. The North Korean plenum of June 20–22 is documented by ISW, Chosun, Nation Press, and Straits Times. No invented quotations.

Stated editorial positioning

I oppose the Kim Jong-un regime and its policy of deploying soldiers in Putin's war. I support the right to asylum of North Korean prisoners who express that request. I consider Russian propaganda in school textbooks a political act that deserves a direct democratic response. This positioning is stated openly and does not affect the factual verification of the information presented in this article.

Sources

Primary sources

UA.NEWS — Russia to add mention of North Korean soldiers in school history textbook — June 22, 2026

Meduza — Russia to add North Korea's role in the war in Ukraine to school history textbook — June 22, 2026

Kyiv Independent — North Korean casualties in Ukraine, figures released by military intelligence — July 2026

ISW — Korean Peninsula Update, WPK plenum and southern border fortification — June 30, 2026

Secondary sources

Free Malaysia Today — South Korea and Ukraine hold constructive talks on fate of North Korean POWs — June 30, 2026

Ukrainska Pravda — Discussions on North Korean prisoners in Ukraine — June 23, 2026

19FortyFive — Analysis of the Moscow–Pyongyang axis and military transfers

Foreign Policy — Coverage of the Russia–North Korea alliance and strategic implications