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Fighting in southern Russia has inflicted heavy losses on troops shipped in from North Korea, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Saturday, as battles intensify along the front line.
Speaking in his nightly address, Zelenskyy said that, over the course of just a few days, “near just one village, Makhnovka, in Kursk region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops. This is significant.”
Ukrainian troops launched an incursion across the border into Russia’s Kursk region in August, capturing a string of strategic towns and villages and taking Moscow’s forces by surprise.
As many as 10,000 North Korean soldiers are believed to have been sent to the area as part of an agreement between Moscow and Pyongyang, amid warnings of dwindling Russian manpower. While Zelenskyy gave no further details, a battalion is typically made up of as many as 1,000 personnel.
In December, Kyiv warned the foreign fighters were being deployed to the front line, while White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the North Koreans were “highly indoctrinated, pushing attacks even when it is clear that those attacks are futile.”
At the same time on Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces reported 179 separate clashes along the tense line of contact, facing down attacks around the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the city of Pokrovsk in the country’s Donbas region. They estimated as many as 1,730 Russian personnel were killed or captured in the assaults.
Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday said it would “retaliate” after it claimed to have intercepted eight U.S.-made missiles fired by Ukraine. Kyiv has not commented on the purported strikes, but has previously pushed for the right to pre-emptively take out critical military infrastructure and drone launch sites deep inside Russia.
