North Korean troops may grow deadlier with Ukraine experience
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and Stuart Willey. Our episodes this week are focused primarily on Donald Trump, his tariffs and his plans for Gaza, and the response to both of those things. Those stories are not over, and we'll return to them soon, no doubt. But today we're turning our attention back to another huge global security challenge, the war in Ukraine. The

The deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to fight alongside Russia was a move some felt could tip the balance on the battlefield as that gruelling war of attrition drags on. But even as they've bolstered Russia's manpower, the North Koreans have suffered big losses. Ukraine's president says 4,000 of them have been killed or wounded...

Now, many of them are being sent for retraining. The Times correspondent Maxim Tucker has been near the front line where they've been most active to try and find out why so many North Koreans are dying. He's speaking to us today from Dnipro in Ukraine. Maxim, what have you been hearing from the Ukrainians who are battling these soldiers?

Well, the Ukrainians have said that these North Korean soldiers are really determined. They're very highly motivated. They're very fit and athletic and mostly young. They move quickly. They're very well trained. They shoot accurately. And they did cause a lot of complications for the Ukrainians. However, the Ukrainian soldiers told me that they were very glad that the Russians had not provided fire support for the North Koreans. They hadn't provided armoured vehicles and tanks yet.

And they were just allowing the North Korean infantry to go out into the fields in the open and basically get slaughtered by Ukrainian artillery, Ukrainian armored vehicles, and Ukrainian drones, which the North Koreans really didn't know how to deal with.

And that seems to be one of the reasons why for the last two weeks, the North Koreans haven't reappeared on the battlefield. After a month of very intensive assaults, they seem to have disappeared to be regrouping and maybe learning from their experiences and figuring out how to work better with the Russians in future. Maximin, your dispatch from Sumi, there's a really vivid description of one particular firefight involving North Koreans today.

And it strikes me that this is more intense than we've heard about from other battles in this war. They're fighting really, really hard. Yeah, so the Ukrainians say these North Koreans, they're really much more motivated than the Russians. So when the Ukrainians normally engage a group of Russians who are attacking, it's quite easy to disrupt the attack. The Russians will start to take cover, maybe try and move backwards. And remember that by this stage in the war, three years on, a lot of the Russians and a lot of the Ukrainians also mobilized troops.

So they're not very highly motivated anymore. They've suffered a lot of casualties and they're worried about dying. The North Koreans seem to be very ideologically motivated and very ready to die for their cause, whatever they believe that to be, and would continue pressing the assault even long after it was clear they were outgunned, they were in a bad position, they were still trying to take Ukrainian positions.

And a huge amount of them have been killed in this way. They also, if they're wounded, they try to avoid being captured. And in this particular firefight, the Ukrainians did manage to capture one North Korean because he was wounded, is obviously concussed, basically crawled into a tree line, got close to the Ukrainian positions and

And then was semi-conscious and he didn't have his weapon with him anymore. He didn't have any grenades to blow himself up. And three paratroopers, Ukrainian paratroopers, were able to creep up on him and take him prisoner. But they said that he probably hadn't realized who they were when they first approached him. They were wearing non-regulation camouflage, which the Russians also use.

And only when they took him to their vehicle did he realise he was being captured. And immediately at that point, he tried to hit his head as hard as he could against a concrete pillar. And they believe he was trying to take his own life to avoid capture. Maxim, what have we learned from the small number of North Koreans who have been captured?

We've only seen two North Koreans captured, and what they've said has been quite a closely guarded secret. The Ukraine's SBU, the State Security Services and their intelligence service and counterintelligence service, has taken hold of these prisoners, and they initially offered them...

to interview for journalists, but then they don't seem to have taken that up and moved forward with that. And we don't know exactly what the North Koreans have told them, if anything, because obviously, they're very, these North Koreans are very determined, you know, people who are determined to kill themselves rather than be captured are perhaps unlikely to give away much information. You touched on this, perhaps, willingness to die for the fight. What is the scale of North Korean soldiers that are dying at the moment?

So we can see there's countless drone videos and imagery of so many hundreds of dead North Koreans. The Ukrainians believe that they've killed or wounded around 5,000 North Koreans, which would be about half of the amount of North Korean infantry that Pyongyang sent to Russia in the first place. Now, there have been different

Details about those numbers, Lieutenant General Kirill Budanov, who is the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, said that there are still 8,000 North Koreans in Kursk and he believes that they will continue fighting. That differed with what all the paratroopers that I met. I met three different paratrooper brigades in Sumy.

and two additional units as well, all of whom had said they didn't see any more North Koreans on the battlefield. There were no more North Koreans fighting. They'd all been taken away to regroup and retrain somewhere. You say the North Koreans are more fit, more motivated. Of course, they've trained for a frozen conflict between the two Koreas. Does that training make them good fighters in what is a much more hot war here in Kursk?

So that one of the things that the soldiers told me that they were very well trained and good fighters, but for yesterday's war, basically. So they were trained in the kind of conditions that they would be fighting infantry battles during the Korean War. And they hadn't updated their doctrine to make them be able to deal with things like drones on the battlefield, and particularly the extent of aerial surveillance, which is just astonishing now in the battle in Ukraine and Kursk.

You know, what was worrying to the Ukrainians is that they were very well trained. They were very good shots. They said they fired very accurately and they were so accurate, in fact, that they were able to bring down a number of Ukrainian drones using their Kalashnikov rifles or the shotguns that they were given. But the fear that the Ukrainians have is that they'll have learned from their experiences and they'll start to approach this in the same way as the Ukrainians or the Russians do, using smaller groups to try and infiltrate positions and attack.

if they update their tactics combined with the fact that they're very fit, they're young and they're motivated, that will make them very dangerous fighters. Remember, Ukraine and Russia both have already demographic crises in their country. They have a very small number of people of kind of traditional military fighting age between 20 to 35. And a lot of the soldiers fighting this war on both sides are much older and they're not able to kind of cover large areas of ground, especially in the rapid pace that the North Koreans were able to do it.

So for now, fewer North Koreans fighting in Kursk. We saw some uncharacteristically downbeat comments from Vladimir Putin. He says it's very difficult there right now. How is it going?

Well, the Ukrainians seem to have stopped the advances being made by the Russians and the North Koreans in Kursk for now. The Ukrainians seem to be now trying to push back now that the North Koreans have left the battlefield temporarily, it seems, are trying to push back and retake some of those villages that they lost on the flanks. But it's quite a dynamic war in the Kursk region. The Ukrainians have not sought to dug in. They're trying to make...

The most of the fact that they've got these really advanced Western vehicles, these are some of the best equipped brigades that Ukraine has. They're using Challenger 2 British tanks. They're using Stryker US armored vehicles. They're using US Bradleys. These are some of the strongest units in the Ukrainian armed forces.

Holding on to Kursk is often seen as a potential bargaining chip should this war move to a negotiation phase, with the chance we may get more detail of Donald Trump's plan for peace by this time next week. How are the Ukrainians seeing this fight right now?

So I think the soldiers and there's a disconnect between the soldiers on the front lines and what's being discussed in Kiev. I think the soldiers on the front lines, especially many of them who've been fighting since 2014, when the Russians initially launched their hybrid invasion of Donbass,

are skeptical that there can be any meaningful peace arrangement with the Russians, especially when the Russians are still and have the upper hand and they're moving forward. They've seen kind of numerous peace deals, ceasefire arrangements put in place that the Russians then just violated and used as an opportunity to regroup and continue attacking. So they just see that the future is that they're going to have to continue fighting whether there is a ceasefire or not.

In Kiev, obviously, they're preparing to try and get the best possible negotiating position and trying to figure out what it is that Keith Kellogg, who will be arriving in Kiev on behalf of Trump, would like to see them do. They obviously need to show that they're willing to engage in peace talks. But I think many of them suspect that it will just become a game between the Ukrainians and the Russians, where the Russians say they're willing to talk, the Ukrainians say they're willing to talk privately.

But nothing is actually agreed for a very long time while the Russians continue to use this kind of opportunity where there's no clarity about whether there will be peace or not to hope that Trump delays further aid to Ukraine and use that time to push for further territorial gains.

Maxim, thank you very much. The Times is Maxim Tucker there in Dnipro in Ukraine. It's worth saying that next week could be a significant one for the war in Ukraine. The UK is hosting the Ukraine Defense Contact Group for the first time, the US having given up hosting it.

And the Munich Security Conference takes place as well. And as well as that, Donald Trump is due to meet King Abdullah of Jordan and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. We'll be analysing the most important developments here on The World in 10, so we'll see you then. But for today, that's it. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. The World in 10

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