A North Korean prisoner of war captured by Ukrainian forces revealed the grim reality of North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia and the dire conditions in his home country in an exclusive interview with the Chosunilbo. He said that in his ten years of military service, he never once saw his parents, and his family was unaware that he had been sent to Russia.
He described a life of hardship, where he was subject to physical and mental abuse in the military and was forced into labor at construction sites for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in subzero temperatures reaching minus 30 degrees Celsius.
He and his fellow soldiers were sent to Russia under the false pretense of “overseas training” and “studying abroad.” Brainwashed from a young age into believing that “prisoners of war are traitors,” he even considered using a grenade to commit suicide after he was severely injured. Reports show that bodies of decapitated North Korean soldiers have been found on battlefields. Nearly half of the deployed North Korean troops are already dead or maimed. North Korean soldiers in Russia are living a nightmare.
All 10,000 North Korean soldiers deployed to Ukraine are subject to this modern-day slavery. “I want to go to South Korea,” one captured soldier said. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea warned that repatriating these prisoners of war to North Korea “poses a severe risk of human rights violations.” A former U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights emphasized that South Korea should accommodate these prisoners, as they are, by the Constitution, South Korean citizens.
The South Korean government and the international community have raised alarm over North Korea’s involvement in the war by sending troops to Russia. Yet, South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party has remained unnaturally silent on this issue.
When the National Intelligence Service (NIS) confirmed that North Korea sent troops to aid Russia, the Democratic Party dismissed the report, stating, “North Korea denies such claims.” The party warned the NIS to refrain from “fanning the flames” by “making provocative statements based on unverified information.” The party even demanded concrete evidence, but when the U.S. acknowledged the deployment, they retorted, “Why should we interfere in a war taking place far from home, that has nothing to do with us?”
When the NIS proposed dispatching a team to interrogate captured North Korean soldiers, party leader Lee Jae-myung made a quip about whether the agency was seeking to “pass on torture techniques.”
Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un continues to send young North Koreans to die as cannon fodder in Russia’s war, using them to secure funds for his regime and weapons programs. On the battlefield, North Korean troops are fed false propaganda. North Korean security agents monitoring the troops in Kursk falsely claimed that “Ukrainian military drone operators are South Korean soldiers,” a tactic used to incite hatred and hostility. Those who dismiss this as a distant conflict irrelevant to South Korea should have no place in political decision-making, particularly in matters of national security.
The Democratic Party has a track record of accommodating North Korean demands. When Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong demanded legislation that bans civic and human rights organizations from sending anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets over the border, the party swiftly enacted the anti-leaflet law. The controversial law was later ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court.
The Democratic Party still hasn’t nominated a director for the North Korean Human Rights Foundation, 9 years after the North Korean Human Rights Act was enacted in 2016. Party leader Lee Jae-myung is on trial for allegedly attempting to bribe North Korea in exchange for a visit. The Democratic Party remains deeply entrenched in a pro-North Korea, pro-Kim Jong-un stance from which it seems unable to extricate itself.
Ignoring the suffering of young North Koreans who barely made it out alive from the battlefield after being thrown into war, and disregarding the horrors of the Kim dynasty raises serious questions about the Democratic Party’s political motives. The Democratic Party’s actions have proven that Lee’s assertion that the party is a “centrist-leaning-conservative party” that embraces “reasonable and sound conservatism” is empty rhetoric.
