(Bloomberg) -- Ukraine said it engaged North Korean troops for the first time since they were sent into Russia’s Kursk region on the border in a deployment Western partners have called an escalation of the Kremlin’s war.
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“The first North Korean troops have already come under fire in the Kursk region,” Andriy Kovalenko, the head of the anti-disinformation body within Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Telegram on Monday, without elaborating.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met early Monday with his top military officials, who reported on the Kursk operation as well as the situation on the eastern frontline, according to a post on his Telegram account.
Russia has been pushing harder to dislodge Ukrainian forces in Kursk, areas of which Kyiv’s forces captured in a surprise incursion in August. Russian forces have also sped up their advance in Ukraine’s east. The Defense Ministry in Moscow said Sunday its troops repelled counterattacks in Kursk about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the town of Sudzha, an important gas transportation hub that Ukraine still holds.
“We are working and we will be destroying the Russians, the North Korean soldiers and anyone who will threaten Ukraine,” Zelenskiy’s military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said after the meeting on his Telegram channel.
North Korea is dispatching about 10,000 troops, including elite special forces, to Russia, a move NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has called a “significant escalation.” Deepening ties between Moscow and Pyongyang have alarmed the US and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with the isolated Communist nation pledging to stand with Russia “until the day of victory.”
Zelenskiy said in Monday’s meeting that Ukraine is seeing an increase in Western military shipments, including artillery shells, as part of approved aid packages, and told his defense minister to boost drone production.
The Ukrainian leader has criticized his Western allies for delays sending arms and for not allowing Ukraine to use long-range weapons to strike military targets deep in Russian territory.
“Instead of providing the much-needed long-range capabilities, America is watching, Britain is watching, Germany is watching,” Zelenskiy said in his daily address on Friday. “Everyone is just waiting for the North Korean military to start targeting Ukrainians.”
Russia has stepped up air attacks against some of Ukraine’s biggest cities and the country’s civilian infrastructure as the cold season sets in. Russia dropped more than 900 bombs and launching 30 missiles and nearly 500 Shahed drones at Ukraine in the last week of October alone, Zelenskiy said in his daily address on Sunday.
(Updated with context on Zelenskiy’s meeting in third paragraph, Syrskyi’s quote in fourth)
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