North Korea's Kim Jong Un praises troops deployed to Russia in rare founding-day speech

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un used a ceremony marking the 78th anniversary of the country's founding to publicly thank soldiers deployed on what he called "overseas military operations," one of the clearest acknowledgments yet from Pyongyang of the scale of its military commitment to Russia's war in Ukraine. Kim delivered the address on Wednesday evening at an assembly hall in Pyongyang, according to state media reports carried by North Korea's official news agency, extending what it described as special gratitude and respect to commanders and soldiers taking part in operations abroad.

Kim did not name Russia or Ukraine directly, and North Korea has never formally confirmed that its troops are engaged in combat rather than training or support roles. But the reference follows more than a year of mounting evidence, compiled by South Korean, Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies, that North Korean soldiers have been fighting alongside Russian forces since late 2024 under a mutual-defense pact the two countries signed in Pyongyang.

The numbers

South Korean officials estimate that North Korea has sent between 14,000 and roughly 16,000 troops to Russia since the initial deployment, with additional waves of combat engineers and reinforcements dispatched through 2025 and into this year. Seoul's National Intelligence Service has told lawmakers that casualties have climbed sharply, with estimates in early September putting the number of North Korean soldiers killed at roughly 2,000, out of a broader figure of about 6,000 killed or wounded overall, most of it concentrated in fighting around Russia's Kursk region. Those figures build on an earlier assessment reported by South Korean intelligence in January 2025, which put losses at roughly 300 dead and 2,700 wounded — a toll that has grown roughly tenfold in the twenty months since.

Nearly 11,000 North Korean troops were stationed in Kursk at the start of this year, according to South Korean media reporting cited by Ukrainian outlets, split between roughly 10,000 combat troops and 1,000 engineering personnel. Seoul's Ministry of National Defense has separately estimated that North Korea has supplied Russia with more than 15 million rounds of artillery ammunition, along with short-range ballistic missiles, since deliveries began. A joint assessment by an eleven-nation monitoring coalition found the cooperation extends well beyond personnel, encompassing weapons transfers, technology sharing and financial support that United Nations member states say violate existing Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang.

How the deployment became public

The military relationship traces to a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kim signed during Putin's visit to Pyongyang in June 2024, which committed each side to provide military assistance if the other faced armed aggression. The treaty was ratified by both governments by the end of that year. North Korea did not confirm troop deployments at the time, and for months Pyongyang and Moscow declined to acknowledge soldiers were in Russia at all, even as Ukrainian and American officials described their presence in Kursk in detail.

North Korea finally confirmed the deployment in April 2025, framing it as assistance to help Russia reclaim territory in Kursk that Ukrainian forces had seized in a cross-border incursion. Since then, Pyongyang's state media has periodically referenced the troops in general terms, including in a New Year's message from Kim in January. South Korean officials say a third wave of roughly 6,000 additional troops, including combat engineers, was already moving toward the front line by late summer, while Kyiv has warned that further reinforcements — potentially tens of thousands more — could follow. Wednesday's speech, however, contained no message directed at the international community, a departure from the previous two years that Seoul's unification ministry called unusual, saying it appeared aimed instead at reinforcing internal loyalty and projecting the image of a self-sufficient, "normal state."

"Our ideal is being realized rapidly thanks to patriotism, voluntary service and devoted contributions by all citizens praying for the country's prosperity," Kim Jong Un told the gathering in Pyongyang, according to state media accounts of the speech.

Who is affected

The deployment has reshaped daily life inside North Korea's military and border communities, where families of soldiers sent abroad have reportedly received expanded rations and other benefits, according to South Korean assessments, even as the state withholds specific casualty information from its own population. On the Ukrainian side, soldiers along the Kursk and broader eastern front have increasingly encountered North Korean units directly, a dynamic Kyiv says has also included North Korean personnel supporting drone operations. For South Korea, the deployment is treated as a direct national security concern, since Pyongyang's soldiers are gaining live combat experience — including with drones, artillery coordination and trench warfare — that officials in Seoul say could be applied on the Korean peninsula in any future conflict.

The arrangement has also reordered North Korea's economy. Officials and independent researchers estimate Pyongyang has earned billions of dollars in Russian payments, fuel and technology transfers in exchange for troops and munitions, income that arrives outside the formal banking channels targeted by existing UN sanctions and that analysts say has partly insulated North Korea from the economic pressure those sanctions were designed to apply.

Reaction

Western governments have used the deployment to argue that Russia has abandoned its own past support for sanctions against North Korea. Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told the UN Security Council in April that Russia's veto of the Council's sanctions monitoring panel two years earlier had cleared the way for Moscow to deepen military ties with Pyongyang, which it said has by now supplied more than 11,000 troops to Russia's war against Ukraine along with munitions and missiles. A separate replacement monitoring body, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, formed after Russia's veto by eleven countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and South Korea, has published findings on what it calls unlawful military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, detailing arms transfers and Russian training of North Korean forces in a joint statement issued through Germany's Federal Foreign Office.

Seoul's unification ministry has repeatedly described the troop dispatch as a grave security threat and has pressed Pyongyang to disclose casualty figures, without success. Kyiv has continued to publicize what it describes as growing North Korean participation, including in drone warfare, as part of its broader argument to Western partners that the war has become an internationalized conflict requiring sustained military support. Moscow, for its part, has offered little public detail of its own, generally limiting official comment to broad praise for the partnership between the two militaries rather than confirming troop numbers or unit deployments.

What happens next

South Korean defense officials say they have not detected signs that a further, larger wave of troop deployments is imminent, even as Pyongyang maintains preparations that could allow one on short notice. Seoul's Defense Intelligence Agency has told lawmakers it continues to track preparations that could support another wave of deployments but has stopped short of saying one is underway, a cautious posture that has held through several rounds of speculation this year. Ukrainian officials have said Russia could seek tens of thousands of additional North Korean soldiers, a figure Kim's sister and senior aide, Kim Yo Jong, has publicly disputed. With the war showing no sign of a near-term settlement, analysts expect Pyongyang to continue framing the deployment domestically as a source of national pride rather than sacrifice, while Western governments press for tighter enforcement of existing sanctions through the new monitoring coalition now that the UN's own panel of experts no longer exists. Seoul's National Assembly is expected to receive updated intelligence briefings on troop numbers and losses in the coming weeks, figures that have consistently been revised upward since the deployment began.