On April 28, the governments of Russia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) confirmed the intervention of the North Korean military in Russia’s war with the NATO-backed fascist regime in Kiev. As part of the operation, several thousand DPRK special forces troopers assisted Russian efforts to retake Ukraine-occupied territory in the Russian state of Kursk.
Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked “North Korean friends [who] acted in the spirit of solidarity, justice, and true camaraderie.” Putin further commented that the DPRK troops defended Russia as if it were their own homeland. The DPRK followed up with its own statements, not only confirming the deployment but providing some political perspective.
Pyongyang framed the Ukrainian regime as “neo-Nazi” and described the North Korean military’s role in frustrating “an adventurous political and military attempt of the Western forces and the Ukrainian authorities” to change the momentum of the war.
The Ukrainian offensive into Kursk began in August 2024. While claiming to be fighting a defensive war, Ukraine justified the incursion as creating leverage for peace talks. In reality, all the Ukrainian offensive accomplished was the sacrifice of life, destruction of expensive equipment, and to signal an escalation to Russia in an already bloody and dangerous war. Ukraine occupied between 100 and 400 square miles of Russian territory in Kursk until a successful Russian counter-attack in April 2025.
Reports of Ukrainian abuses in Kursk
Russian citizens in Kursk have reported widespread abuses by Ukrainian forces, including the execution of unarmed prisoners, destruction of religious sites, and the shelling of residential areas. A resident of Sudzha told Russian war crime investigators, “Ukrainian armed forces tried to kill all of us, ordinary Russian people. I think this is just Nazism, genocide. I still can’t get it into my head. I’ll tell you honestly, I saw someone who came to kill. They came to exterminate the Russian people, just kill people.”
At the time the Ukrainian offensive began, U.S. corporate media noted that the incursion relied heavily upon Western tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles. The West continues to provide ample evidence that this war in Ukraine has been a U.S. imperialist provocation against Russia from the outset.
As of April 26, Russian forces had retaken the vast majority of the occupied Kursk territory, including the strategic city of Sudzha. Soon after Putin’s announcement of North Korean support, footage was released showing Russian and North Korean soldiers embracing after liberating a village near the aforementioned Sudzha.
RU POV : The Russian Ministry of Defense has published footage of Russia soldier and North Korean soldier hugged each other after the liberation of a settlement near Sudzha.
byu/dmcsclgt inUkraineRussiaReport
The imagery of soldiers from the two countries struggling together against a NATO-backed white supremacist Ukraine rang similar to scenes of the Soviet liberation of Warsaw and Berlin towards the end of World War II.
The United States and South Korea, of course, swiftly condemned the DPRK’s assistance to Russia as “a criminal act” and “inhumane and immoral.” The U.S. State Department even went as far as to say that the DPRK’s support for Russia is responsible for prolonging the war. This is the same State Department that, by its own admission, has provided at least $66.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since 2022. The equipment provided with State Department funds included hundreds of artillery pieces, air defense systems and missiles, tanks, armored vehicles, small arms, and aircraft.
It is laughable for the State Department to lecture North Korea on the alleged prolonging of the war when the war would never have happened without NATO provocation and U.S. military aid. The DPRK did not launch a fascist coup against a democratically elected government (that is, the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014). The DPRK did not relentlessly bomb the Donbass region for a decade. Ukraine and its NATO backers did that.
The State Department’s moral superiority about the DPRK’s solidarity with Russia is particularly rich considering a March 29 report from the New York Times detailing the U.S. military involvement in Ukraine since the beginning of the war. The report essentially confirms the reality many have known for three years – the U.S. military has directed the war effort against Russia in Ukraine from the start. This war, often framed as Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine,” is in truth a NATO-U.S. campaign to weaken, isolate, and ultimately destroy the United Federation of Russia.
Resistance against imperialism
North Korean participation in the defense of Kursk is not a collaboration of authoritarian governments, and it certainly isn’t responsible for the long and bloody conflict. However, the DPRK’s intervention in the war is a stunning demonstration of solidarity between the two countries. The collaboration between the two countries against imperialism and fascism reaches back 80 years to when the Soviet Red Army, in collaboration with the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army led by Kim Il Sung, liberated the Korean peninsula from imperial Japanese occupation. The two countries have maintained close diplomatic, cultural, military, and economic ties since.
As long as the United States and its allies insist on unleashing imperialist war across the world to create new markets and exploit more workers, there will be countries and people who stand up and resist. That is exactly what Russia and the DPRK are doing, and what the people of both countries have done since they defeated fascism and imperialism on their respective fronts of World War II.
Join the Struggle-La Lucha Telegram channel