The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) warned Thursday that it had evidence suggesting Russia had introduced a second infusion of North Korean troops to the Ukrainian war theater in early February, replacing the estimated hundreds already killed on the front lines.
The NIS said the troops had been deployed to Kursk, a Russian territory that Ukraine counter-invaded in August, expanding the battleground out of Ukrainian land, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
“Following about a monthlong lull, North Korean troops were placed back in the frontline region of Kursk starting in the first week of February,” the agency explained. “It appears that there has been a deployment of additional troops, but their size is still being examined.”
The confirmation followed the publication of a report on Wednesday by the Korea JoongAng Ilbo that indicated North Korea had deployed between 1,000 to 3,000 troops to the Ukraine invasion during the first two months of 2025.
“Approximately 1,000 to 3,000 North Korean troops were newly deployed to the Kursk front on Russian cargo ships and military aircraft between January and February,” JoongAng reported, citing an anonymous source. “Mechanized infantry, engineering and electronic reconnaissance units that were absent from the first deployment last year were included this time.”
Russia first began invading Ukraine in 2014, “annexing” its Crimean peninsula and backing separatists in the eastern Donbass regions. In 2022, strongman Vladimir Putin announced a “special operation” to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the grounds that he was allegedly a “Nazi.” Zelensky, who is Jewish, ardently denounced the accusations. The “special operation” resulted in Putin “annexing” four more regions of Ukraine — the two Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Russia is currently in talks with the administration of American President Donald Trump to find a resolution to the invasion it chose to launch. While Trump has said he expects to hold an in-person meeting with Putin in the near future to discuss an end to the war, the fighting in the Ukrainian war theater has continued unabated, reportedly aided by North Korean forces.
Zelensky warned in October that he had evidence that North Korea, a close ally of Russia’s, was preparing to send 10,000 soldiers to the front lines of the invasion. Their presence in the war appears to be the result of a pact communist dictator Kim Jong-un signed with Putin in June that both sides described as a mutual defense agreement. Ukraine has since published videos of men they claim are captured North Korean soldiers, which it interviewed with the linguistic aid of South Korean agents.
As of Thursday, JoongAng reported that Ukrainian officials believed about 11,000 North Koreans are fighting against them as part of the Russian invasion and 4,000 have been killed.
Neither Russia nor North Korea have confirmed that North Korean soldiers are fighting Ukraine, offering no numbers to compare to Kyiv’s. JoongAng further reported on Thursday, citing “multiple sources familiar,” that Pyongyang is rejecting the bodies of its fallen soldiers and seeking ways to process them that would keep their families from seeing them.
“The Russian military has continuously requested the transfer of the bodies of North Korean soldiers killed in action, but this has not been accomplished due to North Korea’s refusal,” a source allegedly told the newspaper.
North Korea strictly controls information entering its borders and the only news outlets whose content is legal to consume is produced by the country’s communist overlords, meaning the average North Korean citizen has little information on what is happening in Ukraine. JoongAng suggested that, should the families of fallen soldiers see the wounds inflicted on their relatives’ bodies, “the possibility of internal unrest or public discontent could be greater than expected.”
JoongAng added the morbid detail that North Korean officials are studying the use of “ice burial” – a procedure in which a body is frozen with liquid nitrogen then crushed to pieces – as a form of erasing the evidence of what is happening to its soldiers.
North Korea has traditionally flooded its citizens with militaristic propaganda regardless of whether its soldiers were fighting a hot war or not. This has not changed in the aftermath of the mutual defense treaty with Russia. On Thursday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported an alleged surge in the number of graduate students in “senior middle schools” in Pyongyang volunteering for military service, though describing the work they are volunteering for as border protection along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with South Korea.
“More than 300 graduate students of senior middle schools in Pyongyang,” KCNA claimed, “the capital city of the DPRK, have volunteered for military service at forefront border posts, out of the ardent desire to devote their youth and hope to upholding the socialist cause with arms.”
“It is the highest honor and pride of the young people in the present era to glorify their youth in the military uniform of the revolution,” KCNA reported a speaker at an event honoring the volunteers saying, “requesting the volunteers to adorn every moment of their military service with loyalty and patriotic feats.”
Kim Jong-un himself reportedly visited a military training academy on Monday and Tuesday, JoongAng reported. Kim emphasized the need for “preparing all students to be reliable military personnel of field-officer type who win only sure victory by making them learn about the actual experiences of modern warfare in the Korean style.”