Ukrainian investigators are questioning two soldiers from North Korea whom the country’s forces captured in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
"These are two soldiers who, although wounded, survived and were brought to Kyiv and are talking to SBU [Ukrainian Security Service] investigators," Zelenskyy said in a statement Saturday on Telegram.
Zelenskyy's Telegram post included photos of the soldiers he says were taken prisoner. He did not provide evidence that they were North Korean, but South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said in a statement on Sunday that the two are North Korean soldiers.
Ukrainian officials said the two prisoners were talking through interpreters working with South Korea's NIS.
The SBU said one prisoner, who said he was born in 2005, said he believed he was "going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine."
The other man was forced to write his answers because of an injured jaw, the SBU said. That soldier said he was born in 1999 and was a sniper in the North Korean army.
The developments followed new Ukrainian attacks in Kursk to prevent Russia from taking back territory. A lightning Ukrainian offensive first captured large swaths of the Kursk region in August 2024. It was the largest incursion onto Russian soil since World War II.
Last fall, Moscow sent an estimated 11,000 North Korean troops to the Kursk region to support Russian forces there. Moscow has reclaimed about 40% of the territory, but Ukrainian troops still control more than 500 square kilometers in Kursk, and Pyongyang's troops have reportedly been experiencing mass casualties there.
Referring to the captured soldiers on X, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said that the "first North Korean prisoners of war are now in Kyiv" and that they were "regular [North Korean] troops, not mercenaries."
"The security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific is directly linked. We need maximum pressure against regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang," he wrote.
Meanwhile, a Russian drone attack killed a woman in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region.
Ivan Fedorov, the head of the region’s military administration, said a 47-year-old woman was killed when a Russian drone hit a civilian car with five passengers.
"The occupiers attacked Prymorske all night," he said.
Fedorov said the wounded included two men ages 46 and 60. Two women, ages 49 and 52, were also injured.
Earlier on Saturday, Yevgeny Pervyshov, the governor of the Tambov region in western Russia, said Ukrainian drones crashed into two apartment buildings in the town of Kotovsk, injuring several people.
Photos and videos of the incident, which have not been verified by RFE/RL, were posted online by local residents, who said there had been no air raid siren before the drones struck.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
