As Ukrainian forces continue to annihilate North Korean troops and occasionally take them prisoner, some intriguing details have come to light. A short thread 🧵 1/9
Capturing POWs has proven challenging as North Koreans and Russians alike are apparently instructed to kill wounded NK soldiers to prevent them from falling into Ukrainian hands. Yet recently Ukrainians have successfully captured two NK soldiers alive. 2/9
Both individuals carried Russian military service cards alleging they were born in the Tuva Republic, a region included in the Russian Federation. Russian non-regime media also report that the Russian authorities transferred identities of actual Tuvans to drafted NK soldiers. 3/9
The choice of Tuva is understandable: native Tuvans bear a physical resemblance to North Koreans. 4/9
By the way, Russia’s former Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu is himself of Tuvan origin. 5/9
The fact that the captured NK soldiers’ documents claimed Tuva as their birthplace corroborates earlier findings. Russian service cards recovered from the killed NK soldiers similarly falsely listed the Tuva Republic as their place of birth. 6/9
Yet another particularly interesting discovery was a diary found on one killed NK soldier. Ukrainian Special Operations Forces translated a number of pages from that diary, which the former owner had regularly updated, and one part was especially revealing for me. 7/9
Here is a DeepL translation (UA->EN) of that part. It reveals that the soldier’s motivation to fight was not connected to Russia’s war itself but stemmed from his loyalty to the NK regime – loyalty that appeared partly driven by a sense of guilt over something he had done back home. 8/9
Of course, this is just one example, and it would be unwise to generalise. However, at least in this specific case, the soldier’s motivation to fight in a distant foreign land was not about bringing about a global communist revolution – something that would be too natural for many 20th century communists – but, curiously, about his own individual interests. 9/9
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