A North Korean prisoner of war captured by Ukrainian forces said he came to Russia not knowing who he would fight in an additional interrogation video released by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on X, formerly Twitter, on January 20.
The soldier in the video is one of two North Korean soldiers who were captured by the Ukrainian military on the Kursk front in western Russia on January 12.
In the five-minute and 30-second video, the bedridden North Korean soldier answers questions from an investigator from the Ukrainian Security Service through a Korean interpreter.
The investigator asked whether he had been trained to use Russian weapons and military equipment.
The North Korean soldier replied that “a few people are selected and taught how to use Russian weapons and equipment,” but he said that he received no training in this regard.
The soldier, who identified his unit as the “1st Platoon of the Reconnaissance General Bureau’s 2nd Battalion,” explained that he boarded a train after he arrived in Russia by ship from North Korea.
He added that there were a little over 100 North Korean soldiers on board the ship at the time and that they all boarded the train.
He also said the ship seemed to be a Russian one similar to a freighter, not a warship.
“Even after coming here, I didn’t know that I was going to Russia or that our enemy was the Ukrainian people,” the soldier said in the video in Korean.
When asked if he knew about the North Korean military’s losses, he said that many of his comrades who came with him to Russia had fallen, “but I don’t know how many casualties there are overall.”
He said that in North Korea, you have to join the military after graduating from school, and he enlisted at the age of 17.
He also said his parents were unaware he’d been deployed to Russia.
The soldier said he knew nothing about other countries. About South Korea, he said he only knew that it had “fewer mountains than North Korea.”
Zelensky’s X account also posted a Korean-language message with the video. The Korean-language message read, “The captured North Korean soldiers and investigators of the Ukrainian Security Service are continuing to communicate.”
“Intelligence data on the movement of such troops to Russian territory, their training and complete information isolation have been confirmed by the prisoners,” Zelensky wrote on X. “All the facts about North Korea’s involvement in this war will be established.”
Earlier this month, a Ukrainian special forces unit that participated in the operation to capture North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region said in an interview with U.S. newspaper The Wall Street Journal that before being captured, the North Korean soldier threatened them with a grenade in his hand and that they reassured him in Korean by saying, “Brother, everything is okay.”
According to the interview, Ukrainian special forces successfully captured the soldier after preparing for several days for the operation to prove that North Korea was sending troops to Russia.
They observed the movements of eight North Korean soldiers in a forest in Kursk for several days and planned the operation before carrying out an ambush attack on January 9.
As the North Korean soldiers quickly retreated from the attack, Ukrainian troops searched for stragglers and found one of them lying in the bushes with a leg injury.
Members of the special forces unit said that when the soldier was found, he was holding a grenade in his hand and threatening to let it explode. They approached him to reassure him, saying in Korean and Russian, “Everything is okay. We are here to help.”
A unit member said that the Ukrainian soldiers treated the North Korean soldier like a child, adding, “We didn’t want him to hurt himself.”
He added that when he was found, the North Korean soldier had no other weapons besides the grenade and had no food or water.
The soldier, who is believed to be 20 years old, later said in the interrogation video that he had been injured a few days earlier and had become separated from his comrades.
