Reports of hundreds of North Korean troops dead in Kursk as Ukraine launches offensive

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said this weekend that Russian and North Korean forces suffered heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region.

Russia said on Sunday that Ukraine had launched a new attack in the Kursk region, an area of western Russia from which Russian troops have been trying to eject Ukrainian forces for the past five months.

Ukrainian troops broke across the border in a surprise incursion on Aug. 6 and have managed to hold on to a chunk of territory there which could provide Kyiv with an important bargaining chip in potential peace talks.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces were beating back the Ukrainian forces but some reports from Russian military bloggers suggested the Russian side had come under heavy pressure.

Ukrainian and Western assessments say that some 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from top Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border.

“In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka, in Kursk region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops,” Zelenskiy said. “This is significant.”

The president provided no specific details. A battalion can vary in size but is generally made up of several hundred troops.

Reuters could not independently verify the president’s account.

Zelenskiy last week reported heavy North Korean losses in Kursk region, saying their forces were not being protected by the Russian forces they are fighting alongside.

He said North Koreans were taking extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and in some instances were being executed by their own forces.

In his latest remarks, Zelenskiy also said “fierce battles” had raged along the entire 1,000-km (620-mile) front line, with the most difficult situation near the city of Pokrovsk.

Russian forces, he said, “continue to expend vast numbers of their own personnel in assaults”.

A Ukrainian military spokesperson earlier said Pokrovsk remained the “hottest” frontline sector, with Russian troops launching fresh attacks near the town in an effort to bypass it from the south and cut off supply routes to Ukraine’s troops.

The city, home to a mine that is the sole supplier of coking coal to Ukraine’s once-giant steel industry, had a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. Ukraine estimates that around 11,000 of them remain in the city.