Ukrainian, North Korean troops engage in ‘small scale’: Report

ISTANBUL

Ukrainian troops “engaged in small scale” with North Korean soldiers, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov told South Korean KBS TV.

If true, it is first such engagement since South Korea made claims last month that Pyongyang had transported thousands of soldiers to Russia which is in war with Ukraine.

“Yes… it is engagement,” Umerov said when asked whether it was the first engagement between rival troops.

The Ukrainian defense chief, however, did not reveal the place and date of the fighting.

But it was not a systematically organized level of engagement with all forces mobilized, Umerov added.

Earlier, Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, had claimed Ukrainian forces engaged North Korean troops in Kursk in the first known combat.

But the US, Kyiv’s key ally, said it "cannot corroborate" reports suggesting North Korean soldiers are facing their first combat in Russia's Kursk region.

“We believe that there are now at least 10,000 DPRK forces in the Kursk Oblast, recognizing that as we continue to assess DPRK presence on the ground, those numbers could go up slightly in terms of the total number of DPRK troops in Russia," Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters on Monday, using initials of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the official name of North Korea.

Last Tuesday, the South Korean Defense Ministry claimed that some 10,000 North Korean troops were deployed in Russia.

A “considerable” number of the troops have been dispatched to front-line areas, said ministry spokesman Jeon Ha-kyou, without giving more details.
Pyongyang has vowed to support Moscow until Russia achieves victory in its war with Ukraine.

North Korea has also fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile as well as short-range ballistic missiles since last week, triggering joint drills by South Korea, the US and Japan.

It is “absolute proof of the validity and urgency of the line of building up the nuclear forces,” said the North Korean leader’s sister Kim Yo Jong about the rival joint drills.