North Korean troops arrive in Russian region occupied by Ukraine

Thousands of North Korean troops have arrived in Kursk, the western Russian province partly occupied by Ukraine, ahead of an expected counteroffensive by Moscow. Soldiers from an elite unit of the Korean People’s Army dispatched to the region have not started fighting alongside Russian troops, but officials predicted they would help in an anticipated campaign aimed at driving out Ukrainian forces, who seized about 400 square miles of territory in Kursk in a surprise August incursion, officials told The New York Times.The soldiers’ dispatch to Kursk, with the first arriving Wednesday, came after Ukraine and South Korea warned for weeks that North Korean forces were training alongside Russian soldiers, with Ukraine estimating as many as 12,000 troops are involved. Video posted on Telegram shows North Korean troops being stationed at a military training site in the village of Sergeyevka in the Russian Far East region, The Times reported. “Here they are.The boys from North Korea,” a man’s voice is reportedly heard in a clip shared by Astra, a Russian independent media organization, according to The Times.  Another video showed men, referred to as North Koreans, standing around and smoking while wearing the standard set of Russian fatigues, The Times reported. One senior Ukrainian official told The Times as many as 5,000 North Korean troops are expected to assemble in Kursk by Monday.

The official said it was unclear whether additional troops would be sent out to fight in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, citing intelligence sources, warned the North Korean troops could be deployed to the battlefield in Kursk as soon as Sunday and called Moscow’s use of Pyongyang’s forces in combat zones a “clear escalation by Russia.”Ukraine has held on to the majority of the territory it seized during its forces’ daring August incursion, although Russia set its sights on Kyiv’s positions there this month and managed to claw back so...