Europe
North Koreans troops key to Russian advances in Kursk, says Ukraine
By
Washington Post March 18, 2025
Lizzie Johnson, Kostiantyn Khudov, Catherine Belton
Washington Post March 18, 2025
Russia’s heavy use of North Korean troops and equipment to nearly retake the Kursk region after seven months of Ukrainian control demonstrated the Kremlin’s desire to reclaim the land at any cost and prevent Kyiv from forcing a territorial exchange as part of future negotiations. Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. (Eleanor Brown/Defense Security Cooperation Agency)
KYIV - A fresh supply of North Korean troops, command of the air and a crushing superiority in numbers helped Russia last week retake the town of Sudzha, Ukraine’s last stronghold in western Russia, according to interviews with Ukrainian soldiers and officials familiar with the battles of the last few weeks.
Russia’s heavy use of North Korean troops and equipment to nearly retake the Kursk region after seven months of Ukrainian control demonstrated the Kremlin’s desire to reclaim the land at any cost and prevent Kyiv from forcing a territorial exchange as part of future negotiations. Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukrainian territory.
By Monday, Ukrainian troops had almost entirely withdrawn from Kursk, said a soldier familiar with drone operations in the region - who like the others interviewed for this story wasn’t authorized to speak publicly - describing the parts of Kursk still under
Ukrainian control as “a tiny patch, practically nothing. Just some border zones.”
On a map from Deep State, a Ukrainian volunteer project that tracks changes on the front line, Ukrainian troops are now shown occupying about 10 percent of the more than 500 square miles that they once held.
“Without North Korean troops, Russia cannot even hold onto its own territories with its own army,” said Ruslan Mykula, the co-founder of Deep State. “These were massive waves of reinforcements, much larger than our group. And the harsh reality is, we simply didn’t have enough ammunition and drones to eliminate them all.”
Though a combination of factors ultimately hastened Ukraine’s retreat‚ including the loss of supply routes and control of the airspace, the reappearance of North Korean troops - which had withdrawn from the battlefield in January to regroup amid heavy losses - had a “painful effect,” said a lawmaker connected to the Ukrainian military and Korean affairs.
“We are talking about well-trained and well-motivated soldiers in one particular place,” said the lawmaker, who isn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “I cannot say that the Kursk current situation happened because of North Koreans, but the effect of their participation is quite substantial.”
Moscow and Pyongyang have both denied the deployment of troops from North Korea to the battlefield, despite evidence indicating otherwise, including Ukraine’s capture of two soldiers who are now in detention in Kyiv. Last week, a spokesman for the Ukrainian army, Dmytro Likhovy, said that North Korean troops were “one of the main attacking forces of Russian troops in Kursk” and were operating with greater effectiveness than they had over the winter, when they incurred heavy losses.
Military analysts said that Ukraine losing its foothold in Kursk resulted in a retreat that at times bordered on chaotic - but which was better organized than previous withdrawals, such as from Avdiivka last year.
“Kursk was always going to be difficult to hold,” said Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It was simply a matter of time before Russia could take back the salient.”
The beginning of the end came when Ukraine lost the sky.
As December tipped into January, Russian drones peppered the skies above Kursk - piercing the calm that Vitalii Ovcharenko had previously experienced that fall on the front line. Ovcharenko, who had arrived with his unit in August, said that on New Year’s Eve drones swarmed six Ukrainian military vehicles as they entered Sudzha, quickly destroying them.
The Russians “moved not just troops but their best UAV operators to this part of the front line,” he said. “We did not have enough artillery shells or missiles to hit their rear.”
Entering and leaving the region became more challenging - even at night - as massive numbers of Russian troops began flanking the rear of Ukraine’s operation, further narrowing their territory and attempting to sever Ukrainian supply routes into Sudzha, cutting off the delivery of ammunition and reinforcements and the evacuation of the dead and wounded.
“Russia controlled Ukrainian logistic lines going into Kursk,” said Konrad Muzyka, director of the Poland-based Rochan defense consultancy. “So for the past couple of months, Russians were able to … [make] it incredibly difficult for Ukrainians to sustain their presence in the region.”
The soldier - familiar with drone operations in the Kursk region - described how Russian troops had “superiority in manpower and weaponry,” relying on powerful glide bombs and unjammable fiber-optic drones to disrupt logistics. But they never managed to completely encircle Ukrainian troops, as President Donald Trump falsely claimed in a post on TruthSocial last week, echoing claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to battlefield maps and military analysts.
“We held on for as long as we could,” the soldier said, describing escape routes that fell under heavy fire. “Once the left flank started collapsing, all efforts should have been focused on holding it. … It’s just heartbreaking to see so much effort wasted, so many lives lost, and now we’re losing ground again.”
Once logistics were cut off, “it became clear that an army without supplies would suffocate. And that’s exactly what happened,” Mykula of Deep State said. “Ukraine didn’t lose the battle on the battlefield. Our forces weren’t driven out. They were simply put in a position where remaining in that salient, with that number of troops and those conditions, became impossible.”
Then, early last month, the North Koreans returned.
While they’d initially operated as simple rifle units, these new brigades included the 91st and 92nd Special Forces and now had their own command structures and attack plans sharpened by previous missions.
Operating in small groups on either flank, they joined elite Russian forces and outnumbered the Ukrainians by a ratio of about 2 to 1 - helping seize the key stronghold of Sverdlikovo near Ukraine’s main logistics routes.
“We’ve found their maps: hand-drawn, extremely detailed,” said Artem, a soldier in Sumy who is familiar with the Kursk operation.
“Every movement was written down by hand, perfectly marked. Nobody does that anymore. It felt like something from a bygone era - like a Soviet-style, ultra-structured military approach. Each line was meticulously drawn, as if by someone who had spent their entire life training for this.”
The North Korean soldiers were well equipped with gear that made it difficult to spot them with night-vision goggles, said Oleksandr, 40, an officer who has overseen intelligence operations in the Kursk region since August.
They “made a difference,” he said. “Russians have strong and good allies. They came just in time … our infantry is not as fast as it was at the beginning of the war … both of our armies are tired.”
Now on the retreat, Oleksandr says he feels only relief.
While some have questioned whether the Kursk operation was worth it, at a meeting with journalists last week President Volodymyr Zelensky said that it had “fulfilled its task” by diverting Russian troops from other fronts, including Pokrovsk and Kharkiv.
Still, he admitted that conditions in the region were “very difficult.”
The nearly complete Russian operation in Kursk comes at a very symbolic moment - just ahead of the 80th anniversary of Russia’s Victory Day, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany, celebrated on May 9.
A Ukrainian official expected a “major concentration of Russia’s efforts” to finish the operation before the big day, which will see world leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi attending the celebrations in Moscow. Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov went as far as to invite North Korean troops to participate in the May 9 parade.
As Russian troops approach the Ukrainian border of its Sumy region, what happens next “will depend on how Russian leadership sets its priorities,” said Mykula of Deep State.
“They will have to choose: Either they focus on establishing a buffer zone, securing some kind of political victory, or they reinforce their existing offensive axes to increase the territory they control and use that as leverage in negotiations,” he said.
Though he didn’t know what would happen next, Oleksandr said, Sumy had been well fortified with trenches and infantry. Plus, he added: “All the experienced guys in Kursk will be waiting for them on Ukrainian soil.”