Captured Russian soldier says North Koreans opened fire on his unit
Summary
A captured Russian soldier claimed North Korean troops stationed in Russia’s Kursk region endangered their allies by mistakenly firing on their own unit.
Video footage purportedly shows the soldier describing how North Koreans fired in the wrong direction during an assault, reportedly killing two Russian soldiers. North Korea has deployed around 8,000 troops to support Russia, raising international concerns about escalating conflict dynamics.
In return, North Korea is reportedly receiving money, food, and space technology from Russia. Moscow plans to form multiple units of North Korean soldiers integrated with Russian ethnic minorities.
https://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-russia-troops-ukraine-captured-soldier-1979622Open linkView original on lemmy.world467
Comments45
These guys have been thrown into the middle of a conflict of similar looking people wearing similar camo and using similar weapons while speaking almost indistinguishable languages. This is probably not the only time this will happen.
Oh no! Anyway.
"All white ppl look the same!"
-NK, probably
I mean, considering that the russians are (alllegedly) calling them "chinese" to be bigoted... that probably IS going to be the official line.
"You white people all look the same"
You're joking but when I was living in Asia, people would constantly tell me I looked like whatever random white celebs they saw last from Brad pit, Di caprio, George Clooney or Wentworth miller from a fan of prison break and so on, and I even got Vladimir Poutine a few times. I could have understood Rupert Grint but the rest was just pure "cross race effect". :D
Happens to everyone.
You should reply with "you look like Jackie Chan!"
For some reason most girls got angry at me when I did.
darn. came to say this.
It's actually quite true ...
Hell yeah, this might be the timeline where Best Korea fools everyone and takes over both Russia and Ukraine moves all their people there, and opens a chain of kimchi-focused fast-casual restaurant/DahnMuDo centers called Kim's Ki Brain and Body Center.
Lets hope so.
I give it 50/50 odds of happening in this timeline. It either happens or it doesn't.
Took the words right out of my mouth
Fuckin hell I want to live in this timeline.
Normally I would ask you what drugs you took to post this.
BUT: This timeline has become so crazy that I absolutely believe this without taking any drugs myself.
No drugs, just drogas.
I really feel sorry for those guys, they are recruited to fight someone else's war in a foreign country and are literally exchanged for food, money and space technology like a cattle.
This shows how much the NK government values the lives of their citizens. Grim!
The South Koreans did the same in Vietnam and it is said it kickstarted their economy, maybe it's the same here.
"wrong direction" 😉
confused Nork noises
Orcs v Norks
Not surprising really. Look back at the history of war and see how many occasions there was a friendly fire incident under the best of circumstances. Russia has already had numerous, often high-profile FF incidents in this war alone. Add in a completely foreign group of fighters speaking a different language, etc, etc... Pretty much inevitable.
Amusing as that is, I'm pretty sure it's happened in every war since time began, and will continue to happen until we're back at sticks and stones.
I'm surprised Ukraine and Russia didn't get together at the start of the war to decide who was skins and who was shirts so they knew what team was what. Would have been easier for the NKs to remember which white person was the bad one.
executing anyone smart enough to question or dissent since 1948
Here's your answer, at least in theory:
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-allegedly-plans-to-assign-one-interpreter-for-every-30-north-korean-soldiers-ukrainian-intelligence-reports-3295
So all Ukraine needs to do is take out the interpreter, replace them with one of their own and boom 30 new troops for the Ukrainian army.
Based tactic
Wololo
I read somewhere a few days ago that there's supposed to be something like one translator per 30 (?) North Koreans. I don't know if it's accurate.
I'm guessing that they're gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.
I expect that it's some degree of problem, no matter what.
One element that's kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil
The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they're still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases -- think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time -- it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.
Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.
In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea
The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.
Unfortunately, these didn't use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn't work in English.
As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would -- assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding -- hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.
One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.
Like... The front line, land mined areas...
I honestly feel bad for them. At least Russian soldiers have/had access to info outside their country. This guys are sent there believing they are the best equipped, most advanced army in the world, and they will just replace the fallen conscripts.
Honestly I'm a little surprised they don't make them learn at least some Mandarin or Russian as soldiers, or maybe they do but at higher ranks?
The timeframe is pretty short.
That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I've also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won't stick tightly together post-war.
Guess we'll see.
So, like, it’s prudent to learn a few phrases, “don’t shoot, Russian” or something.
The problem is that… who’s going to believe them.
Ukraine needs to bring in a South Korean resettlement team and tell the North Koreans all they need do is surrender and get their free tickets to South Korea.
What an unfortunate thing to happen on free dozen eggs night.
lol I can't believe even my cynical expectations on the NKs (which are "miscommunicate and get ground into dog food) were too lofty. Well done fellas.
Wrong Slavs!
That was quick.
To the surprise of absolutely no one.
You are kidding me, right? The video was uploaded by a pro-Ukraine influencer in X of all places. Newsweek reports it and suddenly it's taken in this community as the truth? I'm not saying it's fake either. Just saying, it's easy for someone in Ukraine to look like a Russian soldier making up some story about how stupid North Korean soldiers are in the front.
And even if the guy was a Russian soldier, under torture anyone would say anything, even something as lousy as "NK soldiers can't comprehend left and right".