According to the head of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, Ukrainian forces have reportedly engaged North Korean troops in Russia's Kursk region in the first known battle with these units.

In a Telegram post on Monday, he said: “The first DPRK military personnel have already come under fire in the Kursk region of the Russian Federation,” referring to North Korea by the abbreviation for its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

According to Ukrainian military intelligence reports last week, about 12,000 North Korean soldiers, including 500 officers and three generals, have been deployed to Russia, with some units already stationed in the Kursk region.

At a meeting in Seoul, South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun and visiting EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell expressed “serious concern” about North Korea's reported troop deployment and condemned it “in the strongest terms,” ​​according to a statement from South Korea's defense ministry.

The two agreed to work with the international community to try to hinder Russian-North Korean security cooperation, the statement said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that he had told South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol that 3,000 North Korean fighters were at “Russian training grounds in the immediate vicinity of the war zone.”

The US also said last week that around 8,000 North Koreans were stationed on the border with Ukraine.

On Wednesday, South Korean military intelligence said an advance unit of North Korean soldiers may have been sent to the front to support Russia's war effort against Ukraine.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Seoul informed South Korean lawmakers during a parliamentary audit that North Korean troops were stationed in Russia's Kursk Oblast.

South Korean intelligence said it had no information to substantiate claims of North Korean casualties on the front lines. However, it said North Korean troops would face challenges due to the unfamiliar terrain and different methods of warfare.

“The war is being waged in the form of drone combat, but North Korean troops have not been provided with drones or trained accordingly, so we expect significant damage,” the agency said.

That assessment of the difficulties Pyongyang's forces could face was backed on Sunday by the British government, which said Russian and North Korean troops fighting together in Ukraine would most likely face problems cooperating on the front.

“The armed forces of Russia and the DPRK would almost certainly encounter interoperability difficulties if they had not previously conducted joint military exercises,” the British Ministry of Defense said in a post on social media.

experts said Newsweek Since they come from North Korea's insular society, there could be problems with communication and smooth cooperation with the Russian armed forces.

“Although North Korean troops are trained at Russian military facilities in the Far East, differences in language, culture, training and war doctrine could limit the effectiveness of North Korean forces until they are better integrated with Russian units,” said Andrew Yeo, senior fellow at the Center for Asia Policy Studies from the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC

This article contains reporting from The Associated Press