North Korea on Monday officially confirmed it has deployed troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, prompting Russian President Vladimir Putin to express gratitude for their role in recent fighting in the Kursk region.
In a statement from the Kremlin, Putin thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and praised the “heroism, excellent training and dedication” of North Korean soldiers, saying they fought “shoulder to shoulder with Russian soldiers, defending our Motherland as their own.”
The acknowledgment from Pyongyang came two days after Russia claimed it had fully reclaimed control of the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine. Ukrainian officials deny Russia’s assertion, maintaining that fighting continues in the area.
“The operation to liberate Kursk by repelling the adventurous invasion of Russia by Ukraine was successfully concluded,” North Korea said in a statement carried by state media.
North Korea said its troops “made an important contribution in annihilating and wiping out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers,” echoing Moscow’s baseless justification for the invasion that Ukraine needed to be “denazified.”
Intelligence agencies from the United States, South Korea and Ukraine have estimated that North Korea dispatched between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to assist Russia last autumn.
This deployment marks North Korea’s first involvement in a major armed conflict since the Korean War ended in 1953. Pyongyang’s state media said the troop dispatch was made under a mutual defense treaty signed with Russia in June 2024. The pact commits both countries to provide military support if either is attacked.
North Korea did not disclose how many troops it had sent or how many had been killed. However, South Korea’s military assessed in March that around 4,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in the fighting.