A STARVING North Korean soldier risked his life by refusing to drop a sausage when ordered to surrender by Ukrainian forces.
Earlier this month, President Zelensky confirmed that two North Korean soldiers fighting on the front lines for Putin had been captured alive and taken to Kyiv.
The Paratroop regiment responsible for taking in one of the men has described the desperation of the soldier who refused to drop his food even when being held at gunpoint.
Ukrainian Special Forces shared on a video account that the injured soldier refused to put down a sausage he had been clinging on to while his comrade attempted suicide by running into a pillar.
The pair then asked their captors if they could watch Korean romance films, the Ukrainian forces claimed.
One of the captors from Ukraine’s 95th Air Assault Brigade recalled the incident in an interview: “He was lying there, with his head on an arm wounded. He had a grenade, a knife, and a sausage on him.
“I asked him to drop everything, but he refused to drop the sausage because it was food, so we let him keep it.”
Both men taken on January 11 were the first North Korean troops to be captured alive by Ukraine.
Kim Jong Un’s troops are known for doing anything it takes to avoid being prisoners of war which is why one of the captured men ran into a pillar when outnumbered by Zelensky’s soldiers.
In a message with the video, the Brigade said: “It is no secret that North Korean soldiers do not surrender to capture, they are ready to commit suicide just to avoid being captured by Ukrainian soldiers.
Another paratrooper explained how the second soldier was desperately clawing at the trench when he was captured.
He said: “We were escorting him to the road where there were some concrete pillars … and suddenly he ran and hit his head on the pillar.”
The North Korean was knocked unconscious by his actions but later “calmed down” after receiving medical attention and food.
He relaxed so much that the homesick soldier asked his captors “to turn on romance movies for him in Korean,” a Ukrainian soldier called Pavlo added.
Since October 25, over 12,000 North Korean troops have been plucked from their homeland and sent to Russia to bolster Putin’s dwindling forces.
But the Russian despot has repeatedly been accused of using the men as cannon fodder in the Kursk region as the ill-prepared troops fight in “unfamiliar battlefields”.
It has seen officials warn that all of Kim’s soldiers could be out of the war in just 12 weeks with Putin sacrificing around 100 every day.
North Korea’s troops have been consistently into the meat grinder in Putin’s war with reports of soldiers being made to file through booby-trapped fields and blown up one-by-one like human mine detectors.
Pavlo’s compatriot, Serhiy, added to these claims, noting in the video that Kim’s troops have no tactics to win the war.
“They’re trying to crush us with numbers. There’s no special tactic,” he said.
“They fight like the Soviet army. They didn’t retreat until the very last critical moment when our reinforcement group arrived, and we outnumbered them.
“By then, they already had wounded and dead.”
But, it seems that despite heavy losses, Kim is plotting to send even more troops over to the front line, according to a South Korean intelligence report.
It comes as Putin turns to desperate measures to keep Russians in line with his regime.
Shocking footage has revealed baby-faced soldiers as young as six being handed weapons and told to “kill f***ing Ukrainians.”
I was a North Korean soldier – troops will be used as ‘human shields’
By James Halpin, Foreign News Reporter
A FORMER North Korean soldier said the troops in Russia will be looking to escape the battle in Ukraine “from the beginning”.
Speaking to The Sun before North Korean troops were deployed in Ukraine, Hyun-Seung Lee, a soldier in the Kim army in the early 2000s, said the soldiers in North Korea will be forced to go the war.
He said they will be young, so they won’t be that committed to the fighting.
He said: “It will be individuals at first, but more like as time passes, I think there’ll be like a larger number of group defections, including officers.”
That’s because, Lee says, the Russians will likely treat them as “expendable” and even more poorly than their own troops.
He said: “Russian soldiers don’t respect them as their fellow warriors
“They will treat them as their human shields.”
Eventually, the North Koreans will realise the hierarchy and how they are being seen as “disposable” by the Russians and look to flee, Lee said.
He added: “I think they’ll die without any impact.
“Putin and Kim Jong-un would expect more from them… they won’t get the expected results.”
“So, [troops will be told] ‘don’t pick up any material from Ukraine government or in the South Korean language’ and ‘they [claims in the propaganda they hear] are all fake’, and ‘it’s not true’ if someone defects, or ‘if you’re arrested, you’ll be tortured’.”
But Lee believes the soldiers will be susceptible to any psy-ops the Ukrainian government uses to try and get troops to defect.
He added: “I would say, if Ukraine’s government conducts a psychological strategy against North Korean soldiers then the chances are really high [of defection] because they don’t have real motivation. It’s not for money, right? They are not getting paid.
“And obviously it’s [their motivation] not defending your country, and then your parents, and yourself. So it’s just that they are mobilised by the North Korean supreme commander Kim Jong-un.”
