The North Korean colonel's Vepr-12 shotgun.

Yuriy Butusov capture

Repulsing wave after wave of North Korean commandos attacking Ukrainian positions around the village of Malaya Loknya in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast recently, the Ukrainian army’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade bagged a valuable prize: a dead North Korean company commander—and all of his equipment.

Ukrainian war correspondent Yuriy Butusov got his hands on the kit. “We see quite high-quality equipment he has,” Butusov wrote. Most notably, the North Korean carried a Vepr-12 semi-automatic shotgun, clearly intending to use it against Ukrainian first-person-view drones.

The North Korean colonel was leading from the front when his company barreled into the 22nd Mechanized Brigade in a sector of Kursk that has seen some of the closest and most brutal fighting in recent weeks. Since November, a combined force of 60,000 Russians and North Koreans has been trying—and mostly failing—to eject 20,000 Ukrainians from a 250-square-mile salient they carved out of Kursk in August.

“He really ran up with his own fighters,” Butusov mused. The Ukrainian troops were able to drag the colonel’s body back to the relative safety of their own rear area, where Ukrainian intelligence—and Butusov—could scrutinize the colonel’s Russian documents, his diary written entirely in Korean and his weapons and gear, including a Chinese-made radio, grenades, an AK-12 assault rifle and the 12-gauge Vepr-12.

“He had two automatic weapons with him at once,” Butusov noted. The colonel’s heavy combat load was made possible by what Butusov described as the North Koreans’ “very high” standards for physical fitness.

The shotgun is obviously meant to “counter FPVs,” according to one open-source intelligence analyst. As millions of explosive FPV drones cloud the sky over the 800-mile front line in Ukraine and western Russia, both sides are arming their infantry with shotguns whose wide cone of fire is ideal for taking down flimsy drones in the instant before they strike. The Ukrainians have even armed some of their drones with dual shotguns, transforming them into aerial drone-hunters.

Some impoverished Russian troops have taken to social media to beg for supporters back home to send them shotguns. “Any shit will do,” one desperate Russian pleaded. By contrast, the North Korean colonel’s own shotgun may be military-issued.

More than a few Ukrainian observers have noted the North Koreans’ superior preparation for the current era of drone warfare. “The Koreans have impeccable marksmanship training,” explained Volodymyr Demchenko, a Ukrainian soldier and filmmaker. “The statistics on the small drones they have destroyed attest to this fact.”

According to Demchenko, the North Koreans have developed harrowing but effective tactics for ensnaring Ukrainian drones. “One man acts as bait while two comrades ambush and destroy the drone. This should tell you something about their moral resilience in the face of what I believe is the most terrifying anti-personnel weapon available today.”

Fitness, a modern shotgun and clever counter-drone tactics didn’t save that North Korean colonel as he engaged the battle-hardened 22nd Mechanized Brigade. But the colonel’s outstanding kit is surely an ominous sight for the Ukrainians in Kursk as they continue to battle a Russian-North Korean force that outnumbers them three to one.

There are a lot of Russian troops in Kursk, but many of them are poorly equipped and in bad health—if not already wounded. The same can’t be said of the thousands of North Koreans in the oblast.

David Axe

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