The deaths of 100 North Korean troops that Kim Jong Un dispatched to battle for Vladimir Putin are acknowledged.
Kim Jong Un held a tearful ceremony for North Korean soldiers killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine’s Kursk region and suggested it could mark the end of overseas military operations.
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For the first time, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seemed to admit on Friday that the troops he deployed to battle Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin had been heavily defeated.
As Kim embraced children and looked tearful, he paid tribute to the "heroic" warriors in a ceremony that featured the faces of 100 North Korean servicemen and was attended by their families.
In early July, Kim was seen weeping over coffins with North Korean flags draped over them, after initially admitting that he had dispatched thousands of troops to fight for Putin in the Kursk area of Russia in April.
But the ceremony on Friday is the first time he has acknowledged that more than a handful of soldiers were killed, though it is still only a fraction of the roughly 600 troops killed in the Kursk fight that South Korea’s intelligence reported earlier this year.
The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in April that, of the 15,000 North Korean troops sent to fight in Russia, there were some 4,700 casualties.
"The combat activities of overseas operational forces... proved without regret the power of the heroic [North Korean] army," Kim said, according to East2West news service. "The liberation of Kursk proved the fighting spirit of the heroes."
Russian forces are assessed to have largely retaken Kursk after Ukraine launched a cross-border operation in Russia in August 2024, though reports confirm that fighting in the area persists as Ukrainian forces continue to engage with Russian forces in the region.
The Ukrainian General Staff on Thursday said that Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), along with other unspecified Ukrainian forces, conducted long-range drone strikes against the Novoshakhtinsky Oil Refinery, which supplies Russian forces operating in Ukraine and is one of southern Russia’s largest oil product producers, processing some 7.5 million tons of oil annually, the Institute for the Study of War reported.
Up to 12,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk in the fall of 2024, before another 3,000 were deployed in early 2025 to counter Ukraine’s operation. It is unclear how many North Korean troops remain in the southwest Russian region.
Although it's unknown if any more foreign soldiers have been sent to Russia, reports earlier this year indicated that North Korea would try to send more troops to support Moscow before the end of the summer.
On Friday, Kim celebrated the "victorious conclusion of overseas military operations" and hinted that North Korea's participation in Russia's conflict against Ukraine might be coming to an end.
It's unclear, though, if this implies that soldiers who have already been sent to Russia may soon return home.
