Are there any N Korean troops still alive in Russia/Ukraine? We don't seem to hear much about them now.

[keithbvadu2]

[CanonRay]

1. I just read a story that the North Koreans mistakenly fired on Russian troops, killing eight.

Lots of language difficulties and miscommunication, plus the Koreans are very inexperienced.

[keithbvadu2]

2. Mercs are usually highly expendable. Useful for suicide missions. Although not called suicide missions in the sendoff.

[Emrys]

3. There are recent reports of around 200 NK troops trying to storm Ukrainian lines in Kruglenkoe, Kursk

as part of a combined offensive with Russian troops across open ground without air support or other vehicular or firepower backup in a pretty unorganized fashion and meeting their fate. Earlier, the Ukrainians had intercepted and destroyed a Russian convoy at Zelenyi Put that it's believed was supposed to supply support for the attempted assault.

The reports are credible enough that Zelensky's publicly denounced this deployment of NK troops, and a number of videos of this incident claiming to show their advance and the firefight from a distance have appeared online.

Here's a translation of an analysis by the Head of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko:



Here's a translated report from an Ukrainian soldier:



Other reports of a similar suicidal "zerg rush" to the one at Kruglenkoe have come in from Pokrovsk.

The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Agency said that NK troops took out eight Chechen Akhmat troops in a friendly fire incident attributed to the language barrier. There have been other reports of friendly fire casualties elsewhere due to the same sort of confusion.

So there's been a lot of recent news about them and it's all going predictably swimmingly. The North Koreans are being rewarded for their involvement in the conflict by being used as cannon fodder/human shields for the Russian troops that follow them into assaults, and in return they're shooting troops on the Russian side because the language barrier means they often don't have a clue what's going on and who the enemy is, and hence are understandably jumpy. Since Chechens are often used as barrier troops to open fire on any soldiers attempting to retreat from an assault, the scope for this sort of deadly confusion is obvious.

There were also wild reports of a small detachment of crack NK troops taking a key Ukrainian stronghold in Plekhovo, Kursk and killing 300 Ukrainian troops and taking no prisoners. This ended up being a hoax planted by a Russian war blogger who wanted to catch out a couple of other Russian war bloggers he suspected were stealing his copy from Telegram and passing it off as their own.

[mitch96]

4. I follow this gent and he has pretty credible info and vids... This one is recent..