Kyiv:
Ukraine believes that North Korean soldiers fight along with Russia’s army in the Kursk front line have been “retired” after suffering great losses, a military spokesman told AFP on Friday.
Western intelligence, South Korean and Ukrainian agencies say Pyongyang deployed more than 10,000 troops to support Russia’s forces in their Western Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a cross -border offensive surprise in August.
kyiv captured dozens of border settlements in the operation, the first time that a foreign army had crossed the Russian territory since World War II, in a shameful setback for the Kremlin.
It was supposed that the deployment of North Korea, never officially officially confirmed by Moscow or Pyongyang, would reinforce the Russian army and helped them expel Ukraine troops.
But almost six months later, Ukraine still clings to the stripes of Russian territory, something that President Volodymyr Zelensky considers a key negotiation chip in any future negotiation with Moscow.
“In the last three weeks, we have not seen or detected any activity or military confrontations with the North Koreans,” Omeksandr Kindratenko, spokesman for special operations forces, told AFP.
“We believe they have been removed due to the great losses that were inflicted,” he added.
Ukraine said previously that he had captured or killed several North Korean soldiers deployed in the Kursk region.
Zelensky has published images of interrogations with what he said they were prisoners of North Korea war captured by their army in the Kursk front.
Ukrainian officials have said that North Korean troops were flying with grenades instead of being taken alive.
– Kremlin refuses to comment –
When asked earlier Friday about the reports of North Korean soldiers who had been removed, the Kremlin declined to comment.
“There are many different arguments, both correct and bad,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“It is not worth commenting every time,” he added.
kyiv and the West had denounced their deployment as an important escalation in the three -year conflict.
Ukraine says that around 2,000 Russian civilians live in areas under their occupation, mainly interrupted from the contact with relatives on the other side of the new front line.
The discontent has been growing in the Russian border region due to the failure of local authorities to ensure their return to the territory controlled by Moscow or provide updates on its status.
Despite the control of Ukraine in part of the Kursk region, Russia has been advancing in another part of the 1,000 kilometers front (620 miles).
The Moscow army said Friday that he had captured another village, Novovasylivka, in eastern Ukraine, where his forces advance in a key logistics center and a path that is crucial for military supplies.
Novovasylivka is close to the Pokrovsk key center in the eastern region of Donetsk, and the internal border with the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, which until now has been saved by land combat.
Russia in 2022 said that I was annexing the Donetsk region, despite not having it under complete content
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed).
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