South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, citing Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), said that North Korea (DPRK) had dispatched additional specialist troops to support its operational deployment in Russia’s Kursk region.
The agency said that it was still assessing the total numbers of additional forces while the South Korean JoongAng publication says at least 1,000 and as many as 3,000 troops had been sent.
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North Korea’s forces were initially drawn from its 11th Army “Storm” Corps, widely known as the “Storm Corps,” which lost almost a third of the 12,000 strong force and was withdrawn from combat in late January.
Its tactics relied on company-sized attacks consisting of 100 to 200 dismounted troops in the belief it could overwhelm Ukrainian defensive positions by sheer force of numbers. This ill-conceived tactic left its forces vulnerable to both artillery cluster munition and kamikaze drone attacks.
The NIS reported last week that “After almost a month of calm, North Korean troops were again deployed in the frontline areas of Kursk from the first week of February.”
Ukraine’s Center for Defense Strategies (CDS) cited by Forbes on Feb. 21 said that, after having been withdrawn from the front line after taking huge numbers of casualties, Pyongyang’s troops had returned to the Kursk battlefield employing new infantry assault tactics based on platoon-sized groups supported by North Korean Bulsae-4 wheeled missile launchers.
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The latest batch of DPRK troops are said to consist of specialist motorized infantry, sapper, and electronic intelligence gathering forces to supplement its already deployed dismounted infantry units that locked the technical support needed to fight on the 21st century battlefield.
According to open-source intelligence reports, including satellite imagery, the new troops were moved by cargo ship to Russia from North Korean ports at the beginning of February before being flown by military aircraft to the Kursk region.
During his visit to his Defense Ministry on Feb. 8, Kim Jong-un declared 2025 to be the “Year of Training” and ordered thorough war preparations aligned with modern warfare strategy and tactics,” according to South Korea’s Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho in a briefing to Seoul’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee.
The [North] Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on a visit to junior military officers being trained at the Kang Kon Military Academy just outside Pyongyang on Tuesday by North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. In his address to the cadets he spoke about “the current international security environment in which war has become a daily reality.”
He repeatedly mentioned the need to learn lessons from the “actual experiences of modern warfare” in reference to operations in the war against Ukraine. He stressed to his audience that their military education would “surely instill in them the resolute revolutionary consciousness to make revolution before transferring military knowledge to them” and to “prepare them to be combat-ready fighters skilled in marksmanship, expert combat methods and strong physical ability.”
On the previous day, Kim inspected the Kim Il Sung University of Politics, where he also spoke about the “ideology-first” concept that would build loyal and powerful military forces for his country.
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