South Korea's top envoy to the United Nations said Thursday that North Korean troops are being dissipated as "expendables" in Russia's war against Ukraine and treated as a "cynical" means of sustaining the North Korean regime.

South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers on Monday that two North Korean soldiers who were captured by Ukrainian forces while fighting alongside Russian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region haven’t expressed a desire to seek asylum in South Korea.

After a battle in Russia's snowy western region of Kursk this week, Ukrainian special forces scoured the bodies of more than a dozen slain North Korean enemy soldiers. Among them, they found one still alive.

These days Russia and North Korea are writing a new battlefield history together. North Korea has dispatched some 12,000 troops to fight in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. The soldiers are believed to be some of North Korea’s most elite,

Ukraine's Special Operations Forces said a North Korean soldier blew himself up with a grenade in Kursk, Russia.