North Korean soldiers began to go home in body bags over the weekend, as they fought alongside Russians in large numbers for the first time.
“Today, we already have preliminary data that the Russians have begun to use North Korean soldiers in their assaults. A significant number of them,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday.
Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR) reported the North Koreans were embedded with Russian Marines and Airborne troops – elite units – in the Russian region of Kursk, which Ukraine has counter-invaded.
“At one of the positions in the Kursk region, the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea- DPRK] army soldiers were effectively ‘covered’ with [First Person View] drones,” the GUR said in a statement, estimating combined losses of Russians and North Koreans at 200 on the first day of engagement.
Al Jazeera was unable to confirm the toll.
Eight of them were reportedly killed when North Koreans mistakenly opened fire on Chechen troops belonging to the Akhmat Battalion.
“The language barrier remains a difficult obstacle to management and coordination,” said the GUR.
Many of the losses occurred as North Korean troops tried to wrest back the Russian villages of Plekhovo, 2km (1.2 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and Vorozhba and Martynovka, 10km (6.2 miles) inside Russia.
Ukraine’s “Birds of Magyar”, a Marine Corps unit specialising in unmanned aerial combat, released a video on Sunday purporting to be of North Koreans killed in Kursk. The drone footage hovered over a line of bodies with covered faces.
“After each wave, 4-5 Koreans arrive on buggies, line up mangled carcasses in a strip, as in the video, and mask the faces of the deceased,” the unit said in a statement.
Ukraine’s other units fighting in Kursk took pride in highlighting success against North Koreans, whose presence Kyiv sees as a significant escalation of the conflict.
The Faust Unit of Ukraine’s Special Forces reported killing or wounding 33 North Koreans in Kursk using light drones.
“The Koreans, despite their rather strange walks through the fields, are trained to shoot back at drones and try to run away from them. They have not yet adopted the Russian tactic of freezing when an FPV [drone] appears,” the unit wrote on its Telegram channel.
The 8th Regiment of Ukrainian Special Forces said they had killed 50 North Korean soldiers in Kursk and wounded 47 between Saturday and Monday.
Separately, the 95th Polissia Airborne Assault Brigade claimed to have killed more than 50 soldiers in two days and wounded 100. “However, we will only claim that these were Korean mercenaries after a Korean captive tells about his difficult fate,” wrote the brigade on its Telegram page.
“After serious losses, DPRK units began setting up additional observation posts to detect drones,” said Ukrainian military intelligence on Tuesday.
Zelenskyy posted that Russia was adopting gruesome tactics to obscure the loss of North Korean soldiers.
“After the battles with our guys, the Russians are also trying to… literally burn the faces of the killed North Korean soldiers,” he wrote on Telegram.
He added, “There is no reason for Koreans to fight and die for Putin. And even after their death, all that awaits them from Russia is mockery.”
There were no statements from Russia or North Korea on these first casualties of Korean mercenaries.
Operations on Russian soil
Ukraine also had success conducting sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines.
Overnight from Friday to Saturday, saboteurs burned a Su-30 fighter plane on the tarmac at Krymsk airfield in Krasnodar Krai.
On the same night, Ukraine struck the Steel Horse fuel production and offloading facility in Russia’s Oryol region, saying it was used to supply the military.
The previous day, they had burned and damaged three locomotives used to ferry war materiel to Ukraine.
Ukraine also conducted two high-profile assassinations.
On Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) assassinated General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological protection troops. Kirillov was blown up as he walked past a parked scooter laden with explosives, on Ryazansky Prospekt in Moscow’s eastern suburbs.
Kirillov was suspected of ordering the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian soldiers. His assistant, Major Ilya Polikarpov, was also killed.
On Thursday, Ukrainian agents were suspected of assassinating a leading Russian military scientist.
Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in Kuzminsky forest park in Moscow. He was reportedly involved in modernising Kh-59 missiles to the Kh-69 level, and writing AI software for unmanned aerial vehicles for the Russian military.
Shatsky was the head of software at Mars, the Moscow Research and Design Bureau, a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian state atomic energy agency.
ATACMS may be doing their job
Ukraine may also have succeeded in pushing Russian aircraft far enough from the frontline to hamper its ability to launch glide bombs.
Ukraine’s general staff noted that Russia launched 431 glide bombs in the first 12 days of December, after launching more than three times that number in the first