Zelenskyy Says Ready To Swap Captured North Korean Soldiers For Ukrainian Troops

By

(RFE/RL) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he is prepared to hand over captured North Korean soldiers to Pyongyang if reclusive leader Kim Jong Un can arrange a prisoner swap for Ukrainians held in Russia.

“Ukraine is ready to hand over his people to Kim Jong Un if he can organize their exchange for our soldiers who are in captivity in Russia,” Zelenskiy wrote on social media on January 12.

He also offered “some other paths” for any North Korean soldiers who did not want to return to their authoritarian home country.

“In particular, those Koreans who express a desire to bring peace closer by spreading the truth about this war [back] in Korea will have such an opportunity,” he added.

The Ukrainian president’s comments came as South Korea said Kyiv had captured two North Korean soldiers, confirming remarks made a day earlier by Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials.

“Through real-time cooperation with Ukraine’s intelligence agency…[South Korea’s National Intelligence Service] has confirmed that the Ukrainian military captured two North Korean soldiers on January 9 in the Kursk battlefield in Russia,” Seoul said in a statement.

Neither North Korea nor Moscow has commented on the reports.

Ukraine’s SBU intelligence on January 11 released a video showing two men in hospital bunks, one with bandaged hands and the other with a bandaged jaw.

Ukrainian officials said the prisoners were talking through interpreters working with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).

The SBU said one prisoner, who said he was born in 2005, claimed he believed he was “going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine.”

The other man was forced to write his answers because of an injured jaw, the SBU said. That soldier said he was born in 1999 and was a sniper in the North Korean Army.

In separate televised comments, Zelenskiy said one to the two captured soldiers had “expressed a desire to stay in Ukraine, the other to return to Korea.” 

The NIS also said one of the captured soldiers had claimed he received training from the Russian military after he arrived in the country in November.

“He initially believed he was being sent for training, realizing upon arrival in Russia that he had been deployed,” South Korea’s intelligence agency said.

It added that one of the prisoners “went without food or water for four to five days before being captured” by Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine has launched new attacks in Kursk to prevent Russia from snatching back territory. A lightning Ukrainian offensive first captured large swaths of the Kursk region in August 2024. It was the largest incursion onto Russian soil since World War II.

Last fall, North Korea sent some 11,000 troops to the Kursk region to support Russian forces. Moscow has reclaimed some 40 percent of the territory, but Ukrainian troops still control more than 500 square kilometers in Kursk, and Pyongyang’s troops have reportedly been experiencing mass casualties.

Zelenskiy on December 23 said more than 3,000 troops, or about a quarter of the North Korean special forces sent to Russia, had been killed or injured, though he did not provide evidence.

White House spokesman John Kirby on December 27 told reporters that North Korean forces were suffering heavy casualties on the front lines, adding that some 1,000 of their troops had been killed or wounded in the Kursk region over a one-week period.

“It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders are treating these troops as expendable and ordering them on hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” Kirby said.

RFE RL

RFE/RL journalists report the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *