North Korea began sending an estimated 11,000 troops to the Russian Kursk region in late 2024, soon after the North’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, agreed a mutual defence pact designed to strengthen their alliance against what they called a US-led “western hegemony”.

North Korean soldiers previously fighting alongside Russia’s army on the Kursk front line appear not to have been engaged in combat since mid-January,