“INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE”
The SBU mentioned the lads’s seize offered “indeniable proof of the DPRK’s participation in Russia’s struggle in opposition to our nation”, utilizing the acronym for North Korea’s official identify.
It confirmed a Russian military ID card issued to a 26-year-old man from Russia’s Tyva area bordering Mongolia.
The SBU mentioned that one POW carried this army ID card “issued within the identify of one other individual” whereas the opposite had no paperwork in any respect.
Some studies have mentioned Russia is hiding North Korean fighters by giving them pretend IDs.
The SBU mentioned the person with the Tyvan ID had advised them it was given to him in Russia within the autumn of 2024, when some North Korean fight models had “one-week interoperability coaching” with Russian models.
The person mentioned he believed he was “going for coaching, to not struggle a struggle in opposition to Ukraine”, the SBU mentioned.
The person mentioned he was a rifleman born in 2005 and had been within the North Korean military since 2021.
The opposite man wrote solutions due to an injured jaw, saying he was born in 1999, joined the military in 2016 and was a scout sniper, the SBU mentioned.
The SBU mentioned the lads have been captured individually – one on Thursday – by particular forces and paratroopers.
They’re being supplied with medical care and “held in applicable circumstances that meet the necessities of worldwide legislation”, the SBU mentioned.
Russia’s military mentioned Saturday that it had gained territory in Ukraine’s jap Donetsk area northwest of the logistics hub of Kurakhove, which it claimed to have captured on Monday.
The defence ministry mentioned troops had “liberated” Shevchenko, a rural settlement about 10km northwest of Kurakhove.
Shevchenko, a big village, is situated west of the reservoir close to Kurakhove and “is critical to take below management, to guard the city from shelling”, the RIA Novosti state information company reported.
“Now Russian troops can transfer additional in direction of the western border of the Donetsk Individuals’s Republic,” it mentioned.
Russia claims to have annexed the Donetsk area, which it refers to because the Donetsk Individuals’s Republic, although it doesn’t management the entire area.
Ukraine has not confirmed the lack of Kurakhove, which had round 18,000 inhabitants earlier than Russia launched its 2022 offensive.
The Ukrainian army’s Basic Employees mentioned on Saturday that troops had stopped Russia’s offensive actions within the space, together with round Kurakhove.
Russia can be shifting near taking the important frontline metropolis of Pokrovsk north of Kurakhove.
Donetsk’s regional governor Vadym Filashkin mentioned on Saturday that one individual had been killed and one other wounded in Pokrovsk over the past day.
Within the southern Zaporizhzhia area, a Russian drone attacked a automobile in a village close to the entrance line, killing a 47-year-old girl on the spot, its governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on Telegram.
