How South Korea adapted to the battlefield during World War II: The 225th Separate Assault Brigade commander says Russian soldiers are scared of Drones

By March, Russian and North Korean soldiers had pushed Ukrainian troops out of most of Kursk, said Shyriarev, the Ukrainian commander. He said his own soldiers adapted their battlefield strategy.

During the three years of the war in Ukraine, the front line has been used as a real-time classroom.

That also worries South Korea. Cha Du Hyeogn, a former intelligence adviser to the South Korean government and the vice president of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, says that the battleground knowledge that North Korea has could pose a threat to South Korea.

“They went from using World War II tactics to managing on the battlefield with drones,” Capt. Oleh Shyriaiev, commander of the 225th Separate Assault Brigade, told NPR. They learned very quickly.

According to a spokesman forUkraine’s defense intelligence, North Korea has up to 150,000 additional troops ready to go to fight with the Russians.

On June 10, The War Zone publication reported that the chief of the military intelligence of the Ukranian government told them that Russia has agreed to supply long-range Shahed-style drones and improved accuracy of short-range missiles to the North Koreans.

One wounded North Korean soldier was captured by Ukrainian soldiers early this year. The soldier had been badly injured in a gunfight with a Ukrainian fighter, whose call sign was bulat.

He noticed that despite the group’s size — “20, 30 soldiers” — the troops moved together, even in open fields, where they could be spotted by drones. The soldiers appeared fit and quick to move.

The North Koreans carried on without paying attention, even though Russian units were going to scatter immediately. “They would go straight ahead, without any cover, straight through the field. They wouldn’t even hide if there was artillery fire somewhere close by. They wouldn’t hide from our FPV [first-person view] drones.”

He mentioned a Ukrainian bomber drones named after a witch. He said Russian soldiers are terrified of this drone because it is larger and louder than other drones.

If some of the North Koreans survived, it was easier for drones to find them because they were easy targets.

Volodymyr, 35, who leads a reconnaissance unit in the 61st brigade, noticed that at night, the soldiers wrapped themselves in Mylar ponchos, also known as space blankets, to avoid being detected by the Ukrainian thermal imaging.

“We couldn’t catch him because he was young and in really good physical shape,” Volodymyr said. He was gone by the time our soldiers scaled the fence, and they tried to follow him.

Even after he was injured, the soldiers spotted him running and carrying his equipment. When the soldier realized he was cornered and noticed the Ukrainian troops closing in, Volodymyr said, the soldier pulled out a grenade and blew himself up.

The Ukrainian military had been trying to capture a North Korean soldier over the winter in order to prove that the North had joined the fight against the Ukrainians.

Cha, the Seoul-based security analyst, says they make this choice out of concern for their families back home. Pyongyang views captured soldiers as traitors.

Source: North Koreans fighting for Russia against Ukraine have grown skilled in drone warfare

The Russian-Ukraine War, Victory Day, and the War Between the World and “Heroic feats of the Koreans”

“Our medic immediately provided him with help and bandaged his leg and arm,” Bulat said. The soldier has a serious injury to his cheek. Our medic bandaged that as well.

Ukrainian soldiers collected the belongings of North Korean soldiers who died in battle. They included Russian military ID cards, where names were written in Russian but signed by the soldiers in Korean, as well as outdated cell phones, SIM cards and first-aid instructions issued by Russia but written in Korean.

There were also notebooks, which NPR has viewed and confirmed as authentic, that served as diaries. One of them contained handwritten passages from a speech that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gave to military officers last November as well as a soldier’s confession of stealing Russian goods. In the diaries are instructions on how to spot and destroy drones. “One person among three lure it out,” one soldier wrote. The other two destroyed the drone with an aimed shot when the person stopped.

He said soldiers were instructed to avoid battles with North Korean troops. If they started an attack, we planted mines so they wouldn’t fall into our traps.

At the time, Moscow and Pyongyang had still not confirmed North Koreans were even in Kursk. Zelenskyy had spent months offering warnings about North Korea supplying Russia with both weapons and soldiers.

He said in his address on December 23 that the world doesn’t do nearly enough to counteract the criminal collaboration between Russia and North Korea.

In late April, the Russian army’s chief of staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, declared that Russia had pushed Ukrainian soldiers out of nearly all of Kursk, hailing the “fortitude and heroism” of North Korean soldiers. Pyongyang also confirmed the North Korean troops were there, with an official statement praising their “heroic feats.” Putin followed suit. The soldiers from North Korea shook hands with the leader of Russia at the Victory Day celebrations.

“We will always honor the Korean heroes who gave their lives for Russia, for our common freedom, on par with their Russians brother in arms,” Putin said in a statement on the Kremlin’s website.

He says it can now claim to be assisting Russia instead of intervening in the war, because it is a country under invasion.

He said that North Korea could cite the bilateral treaty signed during Putin’s visit to North Korea in June of 2016 that included a pact for immediate military assistance if either country were to face armed aggression.

But Cha expects that Pyongyang won’t agree to send its troops to Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine unless it gets something in return from the Kremlin, “potentially advanced nuclear weapons manufacturing.”

In Ukraine, Budanov, the military intelligence chief, warned in an interview with The War Zone that these North Korean laborers could be enticed into signing contracts with the Russian military.

Two people contributed to the reporting from SUMY. NPR’s Se Eun Gong and Anthony Kuhn contributed reporting from Seoul and Charles Maynes from Moscow.

The attacks on Ukrainian cities, which Zelenskyy characterized as a “pure terrorism” and aimed at bringing peace to Ukraine

Zelenskyy called the attacks a ” pure terrorism” on social media. The USA and Europe are supposed to react how a civilized society reacts to terrorists.

The efforts of the Trump administration to negotiate peace have failed thus far. Russia has refused to agree to an unconditional ceasefire to pave the way for peace talks and has instead stepped up attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitalii Klitschko, wrote on social media that the death toll could rise and that a 62-year-old American citizen was also found dead, though it’s not clear if he was killed during the strike. Klitschko also said that emergency workers have found cluster munitions, which can pose a long-term danger to civilians when they don’t explode on impact.

Videos and photos posted by Ukrainian authorities show part of an apartment building collapsing. Emergency workers are at the scene.

At least a dozen sites were struck, many of them residential buildings, including a direct hit by a ballistic missile on a nine-story apartment building, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on Telegram.

The attack lasted for more than nine hours overnight. During the time NPR’s bureau was there, they heard a missile’s whistling screech, as well as the moped-like buzzing sound of drones.

The regions of Odesa in the south, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Zhytomyr in the west were also hit.