Captured North Koreans Describe Fighting for Russia in a War They Didn’t Understand
The only two North Korean soldiers caught alive by Ukraine said they were encouraged to blow themselves up to evade capture
Updated Feb. 28, 2025
Two North Korean soldiers captured by Ukraine knew nothing about the war they were sent to fight. They were handed Kalashnikov rifles and told they would be facing off against South Koreans who were aiding Ukraine.
Days later, they were fighting Ukrainians on the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region, they said.
They were instructed to evade capture at all costs—by blowing themselves up if they had to. That message was reinforced by North Korean secret police who conducted ideological sessions on the ground in Russia, stressing that surrender was tantamount to treason.
The indoctrination didn’t stop even under Ukrainian artillery fire. Military commanders read a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which some soldiers were told to transcribe by hand. “I really miss you comrades,” Kim said in the New Year’s greeting.
In interviews, the two North Koreans captured by Ukraine offered the most detailed pictures yet of how young soldiers dispatched by Kim’s regime to aid Russia are experiencing the war. The Wall Street Journal was the first Western outlet to speak with the men, who are being held at a facility in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Their accounts of the arc of their lives—from leaving home as militarized teenagers steeped in Kim’s personality cult to being flung into the vicious fight for Russian territory—offer a rare insight into the secretive world of North Korea and its armed forces, the regime’s paramount institution.
They also shed light on Russia’s deepening ties with the reclusive dictatorship that has supplied it with missiles and around half the artillery shells Moscow is now using on the front lines, according to Ukraine. The involvement of North Korean soldiers reflects how the war, now entering its fourth year, has taken on a global dimension, even as the Trump administration has moved to end Russia’s isolation and push for a quick peace deal to end it.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 4,000 North Koreans had been killed or wounded in the war and that Pyongyang had recently dispatched up to 2,000 more troops to make up for the losses. Neither Russia nor North Korea has confirmed these troops’ involvement in the war.
The soldiers who spoke to the Journal are the only two North Koreans who have been captured alive, according to Ukraine. South Korea has offered to accept the men, one of whom told the Journal he was considering defecting to the South. Officials in Kyiv and Seoul say negotiations are under way.
The two men arrived in Russia last fall together with some 12,000 North Korean troops tasked with helping Moscow retake territory occupied by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region.
Used in infantry attacks and largely unsupported by armored vehicles or artillery, hundreds of North Koreans with no combat experience were cut down as they trekked across barren fields on deadly missions set by the Russians.
The two captured soldiers—21-year-old Paek and 26-year-old Ri—are now undergoing treatment for injuries and giving testimony to officials. Paek is mostly bedridden, wounded in both legs. Ri is nursing a badly injured arm, and struggled to speak after a Ukrainian bullet tore through his arm and part of his jaw before his capture last month.
Paek’s deployment to Russia came with no warning. He was trained to follow orders without asking questions. He was drafted at the age of 17 into the special forces of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, which trains for raids and sabotage operations in South Korea. North Korea has mandatory military conscription for men, which lasts for a decade.
The armed forces number some 1.2 million active soldiers, but most are ill-equipped and spend the bulk of their time on agricultural or construction sites, where food is scarce. The men undergo daily ideological training sessions in which they memorize Kim’s commands. They are told from a young age that they should be willing to sacrifice everything for the supreme leader.
Paek, a rifleman, recalls regular defense training and deployments to other regions where help with major building projects was needed. The day he went off for military service in May 2021 was the last time he saw or heard from his parents, he said. Come back healthy, his father told him that day.
He had a stable upbringing as the only child of a doctor and a saleswoman, marks of the privileged class in North Korea, which allowed him to attend school. He studied English and played on the school’s soccer team. His teachers taught him that Russia was an ally.
He and his classmates used smartphones to call each other and their parents, but they were connected only to the country’s heavily censored intranet. Paek said he grew up wanting to travel the world but knew it wasn’t an option.
In November of last year, he was taken by train to Russia’s Far East, where he said he was issued a Russian army uniform and a Russian military ID. Unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet, he was unable to recognize the name. “I didn’t know I was going to Russia,” he said. “I realized it only when I arrived.”
He received body armor and an assault rifle and began training. The drills were similar to those he had done in North Korea, but there was one key difference: Drones were involved. The Russian instructors, aided by Korean translators, explained to Paek and his comrades how the killing machines used by Moscow’s forces worked.
After a multiday journey by plane, train and bus to Kursk, Paek arrived near Russia’s border with Ukraine and was posted immediately to a network of bunkers not far from the front line. It was at this point that it dawned on him that he was at war.
“I had only heard of war before,” he said. “To actually be in one, it felt surreal.” He knew nothing of the war he was about to fight in.
Ri, a sniper in the Reconnaissance Bureau, said he liked to sketch drawings in his free time back in North Korea and also dreamed of traveling. He was motivated to fight by claims from his North Korean superiors that South Korean troops were fighting with the Ukrainians. In October, he boarded a Russian naval vessel for Vladivostok, hoping for a “real battlefield experience,” he said.
Once in Kursk, Ri was told he was taking part in a battle to liberate the Russian region from occupying Ukrainian forces. “I fought as if Russia were my motherland,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I had no fear.”
In the letter read out by Paek’s commanders on New Year’s Eve, Kim Jong Un praised the North Korean troops serving overseas. He called them heroes and said he prayed for their safe return.
“You have experienced the painful sacrifices and the joyful triumph of costly battle victories,” read a copy of the letter recovered from a dead North Korean soldier by the Ukrainian military and shared with the Journal. “The true camaraderie and the solemn emotion of patriotism.”
Paek heard his commanders read the letter from Kim and dutifully wrote down the words. Several days later, his first actual experience of combat would be very different.
In early January, he was assigned to a 10-man unit of North Koreans sent on an operation to block a strategic road the Ukrainians were using. They advanced on foot toward the road, moving obstacles onto it to prevent vehicles from passing.
The men came under heavy artillery and drone fire. Paek felt explosions shake the earth, and he saw a number of his comrades killed. Thrown to the ground and suddenly unable to move his legs, he realized that shrapnel had lodged in them. He thought of killing himself in line with North Korean military protocol.
“You believe that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “You’re expected to make up your mind on your own.”
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He lost consciousness before he had a chance to take his own life. Then he lay on the frigid forest floor for five days, losing blood. The rest had either been killed or retreated. By the time enemy soldiers found him on Jan. 9, he had been on the front lines for only a week.
The men who took him captive weren’t South Koreans, as Paek may have expected, but Ukrainian special forces dispatched with the express purpose of taking him alive. The Ukrainian troops said in an interview that the North Korean brandished a grenade as they approached, threatening to blow himself up.
They calmed Paek down, fed him, and gave him first aid. Gangrene in his feet was so severe that he later had several toes amputated, according to Ukrainian officials. Other than the Russians he saw from afar in Kursk, the Ukrainian special forces were the first foreigners he had met.
“I thought foreigners would be very different from us North Koreans. Maybe even weird,” he said. “Having seen them here, I see there’s nothing different between them and us. They’re all good people.”
Ri was captured the same day. He said he was the only survivor of a three-man squad sent to assault Ukrainian positions. The bodies of at least five North Koreans lay near him in the forest, he said, where he was found in critical condition after being shot in the arm and jaw.
Both Paek and Ri acknowledged that returning to North Korea as former POWs could be dangerous for them. The South Korean government has said it would accept any North Korean soldier who expressed a willingness to defect, saying the men would be persecuted back home.
South Korean lawmakers have called on the government to push ahead with bringing the North Korean POWs to Seoul, with one lawmaker saying they should “come to the embrace of the free South Korean nation.”
Last year, the Kim regime labeled South Korea its principal enemy and declared it would no longer seek reunification. But most North Korean escapees still choose to resettle in the neighboring South, for which their defection is of enormous strategic and symbolic value.
“At the end of the day, we are one nation, one people,” Paek said.
While in captivity, he was handed a flash drive with South Korean television series, including “Itaewon Class,” which is about an ex-convict who opens a bar in Seoul while seeking revenge on his father’s killers. In the TV series, Paek said he got his first glimpse of a capitalist society, where he said everyone seems to quarrel over cash.
“I don’t know if the Russian military and Ukrainian military are fighting over money. But we don’t get any money for participating in the war,” he said. “There’s nothing we get out of it. But it’s an order, so I fought.”
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com and Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com
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Appeared in the February 28, 2025, print edition as 'Ill-Prepared North Korean Soldiers Describe Chaos Before Ukraine Capture'.