On 30 January 2025, CNN carried a long, detailed article, accompanied by photographs entitled Suicidal tendencies and ’80s battlefield tactics: How North Korean soldiers are operating in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The article, by a team led by senior journalists Nick Paton Walsh and Rebecca Wright, offered an insight into “the brutal and near-suicidal tactics of North Korean soldiers” fighting the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Kursk region.

We are told of the Koreans’ blind disregard for their safety and lives, and blind loyalty to their leader:

Detonating a grenade under the chin rather than being captured. Using a fellow soldier to lure out attack drones. Removing body armour plates and helmets to enable faster attacks on foot. Writing pledges of allegiance to North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

All so typical of Asiatics and yet further confirmation of what General Westmoreland, Commander of US forces in Vietnam, told us 50 years ago:

The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.

Cynics might argue that Westmoreland said that to excuse his destruction of so many Vietnamese lives, just as cynics suggest that the frequent Ukrainian claim that North Korean soldiers blow themselves up rather than being captured is an excuse for not having any PoWs to show the world. Except, that is, for the two soldiers captured in early January – the ‘Tuva Two’, of which more in a moment.

The CNN reporters were at pains to tell us that their article was very authoritative:

CNN has gained a rare insight into the world of North Korean troops fighting for Russia in interviews with Ukrainian special operations forces who told CNN the North Koreans they faced in intense fighting did not surrender.

So, a straight from the horse’s mouth, no holds barred description of what is happening at this moment in the forests of Kursk.

Except that on the following day CNN unblushingly reported that:

“The presence of DPRK troops has not been observed for about three weeks, and they were probably forced to withdraw after suffering heavy losses,” a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko, told CNN.

In fact, according to this spokesman from Ukrainian Special Forces, troops from the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea) had not been blowing themselves up in Kursk for some weeks despite the previous day’s reports by fellow officers of the Special Forces.

A generous interpretation would be that officers who regaled CNN for the article on 30 January with lurid stories had been telling the unvarnished truth, but somehow forgot to mention that it had happened at least some weeks earlier and that currently there were no North Korean troops on the battlefield. Cynics, however, might suggest that these officers were part of a unit of Ukrainian Military Intelligence (GUR) tasked with liaising with foreign media, feeding them a narrative which may have little relationship to reality.

The story of the North Koreans’ disappearance — or withdrawal as official spokespeople like to say — was first broken by the New York Times on 30 January. But the NYT also had an “authoritative” report on 22 January which made no mention that what they were reporting had taken place weeks previously. It would seem that the American journalists were under the impression that they were being given a description of current, continuing events:

The New York Times spoke to a dozen Ukrainian soldiers and commanders who are engaged in direct combat with North Korean soldiers, as well as four US defence officials and military analysts, to put together a portrait of how the North Koreans operate on the battlefield. The Times also viewed video of North Korean assaults provided by the Ukrainian military. [emphasis added]

Newsweek did break the story of withdrawal on 31 January, but the Washington Post, at the time of writing, has yet to report the disappearance. The Post is not alone in its ignorance; President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 16 January had either not been informed of Ukraine’s great victory, or was lying. According to him:

Let’s not forget – there’s no ocean separating European countries from Russia. And European leaders should remember this – battles involving North Korean soldiers are now happening in places geographically closer to Davos than to Pyongyang. [emphasis added]

And he warned that:

Russia is turning into a version of North Korea – a country where human life means nothing, but they have nuclear weapons and a burning desire to make their neighbours’ lives miserable.

Not merely is Zelenskyy channelling Westmoreland, but he is reiterating a common meme in Ukraine that Russians are really barbaric Asiatics. This is a view shared by Ukraine’s sponsors such as Carl Bildt, the co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, when addressing the question What if Russia Wins?

Moscow would trade its medieval Mongol yoke for a 21st-century Chinese one – and be seriously left behind as the rest of the world enters a new green and digital age.

It seems that no one has told Bildt that China is leading the green transformation.

Of course, many citizens of the Russian Federation are Asian, which brings us back to the Tuva Two captured by Ukrainian Special Forces about the time or even after the North Korean “withdrawal”. Despite one of the soldiers having a military ID card issued by the Republic of Tuva, a constituent part of the Russia Federation located near Mongolia, the Ukrainians insisted they were in fact North Koreans and produced photos, video and documents to “prove” it.

Curiously, no one other than Ukrainian Special Forces, and Ukrainian military intelligence has publicly actually had any physical contact with these prisoners – apart from members of the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS, the former Korean CIA) who presumably furnished the Korean part of the evidence. Crucially, there appear to be no reports in the Western media of any journalists meeting these “North Korean” PoWs. Significantly, that includes journalists of Korean ethnicity, such as Choe Sang-hun of the New York Times.

So, is this story about 12,500 North Koreans fighting in Kursk, with huge casualties, fake news? Have they disappeared or were they never there in such numbers and it is merely the narrative that has changed? It is impossible to be certain. It is likely that North Korea has a military contingent in Kursk as participant observers, studying what is the most important and transformational war since 1945, just as there are innumerable reports of Western military in Ukraine. In the meantime, both Russia and North Korea have a policy, much favoured by the US, of “strategic ambiguity” — neither confirm nor deny — or, “keep the other side guessing”.

We talk of the “fog of war” not merely because it is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to get a clear idea of what is going on in the inevitable organised chaos of war. However, it is important to remember that deception is an extremely important component of warfare.

The “North Korean entry into the Ukraine war” was the reason given by Biden to justify authorisation of the use of US missiles to strike deep into Russia. That was part of Ukraine’s constant and necessary strategy to draw the US (and NATO) into direct involvement in the war.

Now times have changed and with it the narrative. It is very strange that it has been altered retrospectively, thus discrediting the earlier version. It is surely no coincidence that this change has happened in the same month that Trump returned to the presidency. Trump appears and the North Koreans disappear. How this fits in with Trump’s bizarre, incoherent and unpredictable strategy is as yet unclear.

The fog is thickened by a recent report that Kyrylo Budanov, commander of Military Intelligence, claims that “North Koreans are still fighting on the front lines in Kursk, but at a reduced capacity”, thus deliberately contradicting Oleksandr Kindratenko of Special Operations Forces. Special Operations were part of Military Intelligence, which comes under the Ministry of Defence, but were hived off into the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2016. The conflicting claims over the narrative may be a reflection of the rivalry between them on how best to handle the all-important relationship with American sponsors in Trump’s Washington.