About 600 North Korean soldiers have been killed fighting in Russia’s war in Ukraine, South Korean lawmakers have said, citing intelligence officials.
Speaking after a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) on Wednesday, Lee Seong-kweun and Kim Byung-kee told reporters that an estimated 4,700 North Koreans had been killed or injured so far in the war.
Lee and Kim, who co-chair the legislature’s intelligence committee, made their comments two days after Pyongyang confirmed for the first time that it had sent troops to Russia to support Moscow’s war.
In a report by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was quoted as saying he had ordered the deployment of troops to “annihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers and liberate the Kursk area in cooperation with the Russian armed forces”.
The latest casualty figures mark a significant jump from the NIS’s briefing to lawmakers in January, when the spy agency reportedly said that about 300 North Korean troops had been killed in the conflict.
In their briefing to reporters, Lee and Kim, members of the conservative People Power Party and liberal Democratic Party, respectively, said that the NIS estimates that Pyongyang has deployed about 15,000 soldiers in total.
The lawmakers also said that Pyongyang appears to have received technical assistance on spy satellites in return for its assistance, as well as drones, electronic warfare equipment and SA-22 surface-to-air missiles.
“After six months of participation in the war, the North Korean military has become less inept, and its combat capability has significantly improved as it becomes accustomed to using new weapons such as drones,” Lee told reporters.
