“INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE”
The SBU said the men’s capture provided “indisputable evidence of the DPRK’s participation in Russia’s war against our country”, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name.
It showed a Russian army ID card issued to a 26-year-old man from Russia’s Tyva region bordering Mongolia.
The SBU said that one POW carried this military ID card “issued in the name of another person” while the other had no documents at all.
Some reports have said Russia is hiding North Korean fighters by giving them fake IDs.
The SBU said the man with the Tyvan ID had told them it was given to him in Russia in the autumn of 2024, when some North Korean combat units had “one-week interoperability training” with Russian units.
The man said he believed he was “going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine”, the SBU said.
The man said he was a rifleman born in 2005 and had been in the North Korean army since 2021.
The other man wrote answers because of an injured jaw, saying he was born in 1999, joined the army in 2016 and was a scout sniper, the SBU said.
The SBU said the men were captured separately – one on Thursday – by special forces and paratroopers.
They are being provided with medical care and “held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law”, the SBU said.
Russia’s army said Saturday that it had gained territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region northwest of the logistics hub of Kurakhove, which it claimed to have captured on Monday.
The defence ministry said troops had “liberated” Shevchenko, a rural settlement about 10km northwest of Kurakhove.
Shevchenko, a large village, is located west of the reservoir near Kurakhove and “is necessary to take under control, to protect the town from shelling”, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.
“Now Russian troops can move further towards the western border of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” it said.
Russia claims to have annexed the Donetsk region, which it refers to as the Donetsk People’s Republic, though it does not control the whole region.
Ukraine has not confirmed the loss of Kurakhove, which had around 18,000 inhabitants before Russia launched its 2022 offensive.
The Ukrainian military’s General Staff said on Saturday that troops had stopped Russia’s offensive actions in the area, including around Kurakhove.
Russia is also moving close to taking the vital frontline city of Pokrovsk north of Kurakhove.
Donetsk’s regional governor Vadym Filashkin said on Saturday that one person had been killed and another wounded in Pokrovsk over the last day.
In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a Russian drone attacked a car in a village near the front line, killing a 47-year-old woman on the spot, its governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on Telegram.
