Western governments had expected that the North Korean soldiers would be sent to Russia’s Kursk border region, where a 3-month-old incursion by the Ukrainian army is the first occupation of Russian territory since World War II and has embarrassed the Kremlin.

North Korean troops have entered combat with Ukrainian forces, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, calling the engagement a "new page of instability in the world." "I want to thank everyone in the world who reacted to the deployment of North Korean soldiers in Russia,