Yang continued, “North Korean soldiers are very brave I mean, especially those of Storm Corps. They are willing to die for their country. But the problem is that passion doesn’t mean efficient combat skills… [They suffered] a lot of bloodshed in the early stage of the Kursk campaign, but they learned the lessons of modern drone warfare.”
“Cannon fodder”, is how “Sultan”, a soldier with Ukraine’s 95th Air Assault Brigade described North Korean troops. He faced them in the battle for Kursk at the end of 2024.
“They would begin with one large assault group, then another 15–20 men would be sent into the same position, and then more after that. The North Koreans operated differently. They kept moving all the time. That gave them a certain advantage, but not a decisive one,” he recalled recently in Kyiv.
Communication between them and their Russian allies appeared poor, he said, and their soldiers were inadequately equipped.
After combat, Sultan and his men would search enemy corpses for documents and intelligence information. On the Russian dead they would find personal belongings, identification and equipment. “But when we searched the North Koreans specifically, the only thing we found on them was simply ammo. We checked absolutely all the small pockets – there were no documents, nothing at all,” he explained.
Other Ukrainian soldiers reported the North Koreans lacked body armour, winter clothing and helmets.
In one chilling video from a Ukrainian assault, a wounded North Korean soldier lies prone on the snow-covered ground in a wooded area. As the Ukrainians approach, he detonates a grenade under his chin, after calling out, with his last words, the name of his leader, Kim Jong Un.
In April 2025, at a memorial service in Pyongyang at the newly created Museum of Foreign Military Operations, Kim praised heroes who choose suicide over capture.
In a speech to relatives, with Russia’s Defence Minister Andrey Belousov in attendance, he said they were “heroes who unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting, suicide attack, in order to defend the great honour”.
