North Korean forces are suffering heavy casualties on the front lines of Russia's conflict against Ukraine, with a thousand personnel killed or injured in the last week alone in Russia's Kursk area, White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Friday.
The sum substantially exceeds what US authorities had previously revealed.
“It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders are treating these troops as expendable and ordering them on hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” Kirby said, describing the North Korean troops’ offensive as “massed, dismounted assaults.”
The North Korean mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately reply to a request for comment, and Russia's U.N. The mission declined to comment.
In his nightly video message, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy stated that North Korean soldiers had suffered "very significant" losses and were being ordered into battle with relatively limited support from Russian forces.
“We see that neither the Russian military nor their North Korean overseers have any interest in ensuring the survival of these North Koreans,” he said.
“Everything is set up so that it is impossible for us to capture them. There are instances in which they are executed by their own forces. Russians send them into assaults with minimal protection.”
He said Ukrainian forces had managed to take a few North Korean soldiers prisoner “but they were severely wounded and it was not possible to save their lives.”
Koreans should not be losing their lives in a war in Europe, he said, and if China was sincere in not wanting the war to expand, “it needs to exert appropriate pressure on Pyongyang.”
On Monday, Zelenskiy stated that more than 3,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Kursk region. He said he was citing preliminary data.
On December 17, a US military officer said that North Korea had sustained several hundred casualties in the Kursk area.
When asked about the ranks of the North Korean victims, the military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they ranged from lower-level personnel to "very near the top."
In his remarks, White House spokeswoman Kirby stated that President Joe Biden is expected to approve another security assistance package for Ukraine in the coming days.
Earlier this week, Biden decried Russia's Christmas Day strikes on Ukraine's electricity infrastructure and some of its cities, and urged the Defense Department to continue sending weaponry to Ukraine.
Reuters was unable to independently verify reports of fighting casualties or narratives from either side.
