Ukraine’s Zelensky confirms first combat engagement with North Korean troops

SEOUL, Nov. 6 (UPI) — North Korean troops have entered combat with Ukrainian forces, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, calling the engagement a “new page of instability in the world.”

“I want to thank everyone in the world who reacted to the deployment of North Korean soldiers in Russia,” Zelensky said in a video address on Tuesday.

“The first battles with North Korean soldiers open a new page of instability in the world,” he said. “Together with the world, we must do everything to make this Russian step to expand the war — to really escalate it — to make this step a failure.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov told South Korean public broadcaster KBS that the North Korean troops had already engaged in small-scale skirmishes on the frontline area of Kursk.

The soldiers are wearing Russian uniforms and being passed off as a Mongolian ethnic group from Siberia, Umerov said, making it difficult to identify any casualties or prisoners yet.

The minister said that Kyiv expects five units of roughly 3,000 North Korean soldiers to be deployed over the next few weeks along a front line stretching more than 900 miles, for a total of 15,000 troops.

“They’ve provided them a training period of a month, which is now being shortened to several weeks or to one week so that they could get engagement on the battlefield,” Umerov said.

On Monday, Zelensky said that 11,000 North Korean troops were already in the Kursk region of southwest Russia, while U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller placed the estimate at 10,000.

The top diplomats of the United States, South Korea and several other countries expressed “grave concerns” over the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia in a joint statement on Tuesday.

“The DPRK’s direct support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, besides showing Russia’s desperate efforts to compensate its losses, would mark a dangerous expansion of the conflict,” the statement read, using the official acronym for North Korea.

It was also signed by the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the high representative of the European Union.

“We are also deeply concerned about the potential for any transfer of nuclear or ballistic missile-related technology from Russia to the DPRK,” the statement added.

On Tuesday, North Korea launched a salvo of short-range missiles into the East Sea, days after it test-fired a new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile.