A captured North Korean soldier refused to hand over his sausage despite being held at gunpoint by Ukrainian special forces.
Ukraine's 95th Air Assault Brigade captured two men on January 11, marking the first of Pyongyang's troops to be taken in for questioning.
Paratroopers caught them as they were fighting for Russia and published a detailed video account of the incident on Telegram, revealing how one of them risked his life for food.
One of the soldiers said: “He was lying there, with his head and an arm wounded. He had a grenade, a knife and a sausage on him. I asked him to drop everything, but he refused to drop the sausage because it was food, so we let him keep it.”
The brigade made both soldiers surrender, with the second seemingly trying to kill himself by running into a pillar to avoid capture, knocking himself unconscious.
Paratrooper “Ded” said: “We were escorting him to the road where there were some concrete pillars … and suddenly he ran and hit his head on the pillar.”
The brigade added: “It is no secret that North Korean soldiers do not surrender to capture, they are ready to commit suicide just to avoid being captured by Ukrainian soldiers.”
The North Korean was then given good and medical assistance, at which point he calmed down and “even asked to turn on romance movies for him in Korean”, Ukrainian soldier “Pavlo” said.
Another soldier, “Serhiy”, also revealed how the North Korean soldiers behave on the battlefield, claiming they “fight like the Soviet army”. He said: “They're trying to crush us with numbers. There's no special tactic.
“They fought like the Soviet army. They did not retreat until the very last critical moment when our reinforcement group arrived, and we outnumbered them. By then, they had already been wounded and dead.”
The North Korean soldiers said they were issued fake Russian military IDs and thought they were being sent for training, not to fight in the war, South Korea's spy agency said.
Volodymyr Zelensky said there will “undoubtedly be more” soldiers from Pyongyang captured by his men as they appear to be taking up infantry roles in Kursk.
The Ukrainian president believes 4,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or injured so far after 12,000 were deployed to the border region in October.