North Korean troops, unacknowledged by their own country, are getting chewed up in a vicious war in which, far from home, they are “cannon fodder” fighting anonymously on behalf of the Russians.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, monitoring the war in Ukraine from as close to the action as its agents and informants can get, reports that “at least 300 North Korean soldiers dispatched to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine have been killed.” That’s according to Seoul’s Yonhap News.

The intelligence service, briefing members of South Korea’s national assembly, estimated  “massive casualties,” including another 2,700 North Koreans, wearing Russian uniforms and carrying Russian ID cards, have been wounded.

Yonhap quoted an NIS source as attributing the high casualty rate to the North Koreans’ “lack of understanding of modern warfare” while wasting resources on “useless” attempts at shooting down drones.

They’re “cannon fodder,” a noted author of books on North Korea’s armed forces, Robert Collins, tells the Sun. “I would be shocked if Russians had any confidence in them.” 

For that reason, says Mr. Collins, who has made a career analyzing North Korea for the United States Forces Korea Command, “Russians don’t trust them” and are risking North Korean lives “in ways they themselves don’t want to expose themselves.” 

Daily NK, a South Korean website that monitors North Korea with its own sources inside the communistic regime, reports “videos and photos appearing on Ukrainian military social media accounts are even more shocking.”

The footage shows “scenes of North Korean soldiers coming under drone attack as they cross snow-covered fields and images of dead soldiers with their faces destroyed,” says Daily NK. “Such footage demonstrates how North Korean soldiers — deployed to the front with little experience in actual combat — are dying in vain, along with North Korean-style barbarity that habitually engages in inhumane behavior in the name of’ “security.’” 

Among other evidence of the horrors of the war for North Korea, Daily NK cites a diary released by Ukraine’s special operations forces that discloses North Korea’s “contempt for human life,” including the lives of between 10,000 and 12,000 North Koreans now fighting in Ukraine.  

“Given how the soldier talked of his ‘ingratitude’ and ‘chance for redemption,’” says the Daily NK report, “it appears the North Korean authorities sent him to the danger zone after promising to pardon him or reduce his prison sentence.”

The North Koreans are no doubt gaining valuable combat experience as they tear away at Ukrainian gains in the Kursk region along the Ukraine’s eastern frontier, but “these are very inexperienced troops who have never trained for warfare on flat terrain with exposure to drones,” says Mr. Collins. “Their inability to move through treed areas to partially cover their advances or maneuvers is nothing they have ever done before.”

On the basis of his own long experience in dealing with South Korean intelligence analysts, Mr. Collins believes the number of North Koreans killed in action is “probably a lot more” than the figure of 300 put out by the NIS. Adding to the hell endured by North Koreans is that each company-level unit of about 100 men “has a political officer who demands loyalty to orders above all else.” Such rigid discipline, he says, “neutralizes adaptability.”

It’s no doubt for that reason that no North Koreans have surrendered and only two have been captured. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has offered to exchange them in return for Ukraine prisoners, but one of them has said he would rather stay where he is, on the Ukrainian side, knowing he would face torture, imprisonment and possible execution if he had to return to the North Korean side.

Daily NK, in an extraordinary exchange conducted via highly secret mobile phone links, quotes a man identified as “a senior military official inside North Korea” as saying the bodies of the slain soldiers “will never be returned” to North Korea. Rather, “their cremated remains will come home,” he is quoted as saying, but “we may not always be able to process bodies quickly, depending on the state of the war.”

Asked if the authorities were “using means to render the troops unidentifiable, giving soldiers fake IDs and burning the faces off the dead,” he responded,  “This is a military strategy to prevent and hinder enemy forces from gathering intelligence, and even combat personnel sent to the enemy line approved of it in oaths taken before the army standard prior to their deployment.”