Does a ‘warning from Kursk’ show the reality of North Korea’s Russian misadventure?

On Thursday, the pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel ‘ExileNova’ released a two-minute video entitled ‘Warning from Kursk’. The video shows an unnamed, seriously injured person North Korean soldier who says he was the sole survivor of a 40-man unit decimated by a Ukrainian artillery and drone strike in the Kursk region of Russia.

The footage shows the man lying in a hospital bed, his head and face wrapped in bandages that appear to be soaked in blood and pus and a nasal catheter held in place with another bandage.

Needless to say, the video was quick fetched by other social media, which were divided between the pro-Ukrainian sites that said it was real and the pro-Kremlin bloggers that said it was fake propaganda.

While Kyiv Post cannot confirm the veracity of the video, it is interesting that South Korean media outlets are reporting it News Naver And JongAng saying that although it was difficult to understand everything the man said, both agreed that he spoke with a distinct North Korean accent.

In the video, he claims that he and his comrades were lied to by the commander of the Russian unit they were attached to, expressed his frustrations with President Putin and urged his compatriots to stay home.”

He said they had been assigned to guard a defensive position somewhere in Kursk, where they were told they would be “safe from attack as long as we were in the defensive position… and that we would not be needed to be on the front line to participate.”

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He said that as soon as their position was attacked by Ukrainian forces, “the Russian army forced us to participate in the (counter)offensive,” which he called the Battle of Kursk. He said there was no plan that claimed: “The Russians did not conduct any reconnaissance before the attack and left us without weapons to defend ourselves.”

The man also said: “When Ukraine started attacking, all forty members of our unit were launched into the attack, all of them were killed, including my friends Hyuk-cheol and Gyeong-hwan – who had their heads blown off by shrapnel. ”

He continued, “I could only survive by hiding under their corpses. My grandfather told me stories about the Fatherland Liberation War (1950-53 Korean War), but I didn’t know it would be like this. In reality, my comrades were simply sacrificed, used merely as fodder… historical material.”

The soldier continued: “The Ukrainian soldiers were well armed with the latest weapons and are highly motivated… but the Russian army has lost too many weapons and equipment, so it is just sending waves of soldiers like us recklessly into the offensive.”

He adds: “I have seen with my own eyes mountains of bodies of Russian soldiers, as well as destroyed defensive positions,” before concluding: “This is truly the evil of this world –

Putin will lose this war.”

Jonas Ohman, head of the Lithuanian non-profit organization (NGO) Blue-Yellow, which provides support to Ukrainian forces in the area, said they had already seen North Korean soldiers in Kursk on October 25. He is also quoted by the news site JonAng as saying that the North Korean soldier had documents proving he was from the Buryat region, lending weight to earlier suggestions that Russia concealed the identity of Pyongyang’s troops.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr said this in an interview on Thursday Zelenskiy said: “So far, North Korean troops have not participated in the battle. They are preparing to engage (in Kursk),” but said there was no confirmation of any firefight between Ukrainian and North Korean forces or reports of North Korean casualties. However, he said the fighting would soon become a reality “within a matter of days, not weeks or months.”