Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (HUR) told the military issues website The War Zone (TWZ) that recent media reports of the almost total withdrawal of North Korean (DPRK) troops from the front line were simply wrong.
He said that there are still as many as 8,000 fighting on the front lines in Kursk, even though the heavy casualties they have experienced since being deployed to the Russian region have impacted on their operations and redeployment from some parts of the combat zone. Budanov is quoted as saying the reasons for this are unclear:
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“We have to wait some time to see if there are any real changes or if this is just lower activities for a couple of days.”
Budanov’s comments have contradicted widespread international and Ukrainian media reports, including those of The New York Times, CNN, The Times and Kyiv Post, on the almost total withdrawal of North Korean troops from the combat zone in Russia’s Kursk region.
The reports cited Ukrainian special forces (SSO) sources including Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko who told CNN: “The presence of DPRK troops has not been observed for about three weeks, and they were probably forced to withdraw after suffering heavy losses.”
A similar assessment came from the commander of Ukraine’s 1st Combat Divers Battalion with the call sign “Puls.” Kindratenko later rowed back on these comments when he told Ukrainska Pravda that his comments only referred to areas of the front where SSO units are active.
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As TWZ pointed out, however, it wasn’t only military spokespersons who claimed the North Korean troops had withdrawn. Mikhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote in a similar vein on his “X” channel:
“Some North Korean units have been pulled back from the front line in the Kursk region, according to reports from Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces… It turns out that even [DPRK leader] Kim Jong-un values the lives of his subjects more than [Russian President Vladimir] Putin values Russians. The Eastern monarch considers losses of 40% of personnel unacceptable. Meanwhile, Putin sends wave after wave of people from Russia’s poorest regions to storm Ukrainian positions – on old Ladas, motorcycles, scooters, and even crutches.”
Budanov confirmed other reports which suggest almost a quarter of the 12,000 DPRK troops sent to Kursk to try to dislodge Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region they invaded in August. He said these losses were a combination of “a lack of real combat experience,” their use in meat attacks “almost without any combat vehicles,” and their unthinking devotion to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un.
Even so, Budanov maintained that the reports of DPRK troop withdrawals in the media are “wrong.”
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