'The whole world should be helping Ukraine,' says Lee Byung-hun, believed to be the only South Korean enlisted with Ukrainian forces. He says this service is a way of 'showing my respect to my heroes,' the western nations that fought in the 1950s to save South Korea from the North.
When he was a soldier in the South Korean army, Lee Byung-hun spent much of his three-year service peering across the Demilitarized Zone at the North Korean army on the other side. Back then, he considered the soldiers he watched through his binoculars to be the enemy, a constant threat to his family and his hometown of Seoul.
More than 30 years later, Mr. Lee is once again on the opposite side of a conflict line from North Korean troops – this time more than 8,000 kilometres away from home in the war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war that has reportedly left thousands of North Koreans dead and injured – and has cost Mr. Lee his left arm.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent some 11,000 soldiers to shore up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s three-year-old invasion of Ukraine. The North Koreans have been fighting, and reportedly taking heavy casualties, on the front line in Russia’s Kursk region, part of which has been under Ukrainian control since a surprise offensive last summer.
Mr. Lee, who keeps photos of his wartime exploits on his phone, feels pity for the North Korean fighters: 'They are very young.'
Mr. Lee is believed to be the only South Korean currently enlisted on the Ukrainian side of the conflict, though he is seeking discharge papers due to his injury. He says he now feels sorry for his old enemies. “It makes me so sad. I’m thinking of their moms and dads and families,” he said in an interview near Kyiv. “They are very young. These are teenagers on the front line.”
Ukrainian and Western officials estimate that nearly a third of the North Koreans have been killed or wounded since they first clashed with Ukrainian troops in early November. That high casualty rate has been attributed to tactics that have seen waves of North Koreans charge directly at Ukrainian lines, or even across minefields, leaving Russian troops to advance behind them.
The diary of one North Korean killed in combat – identified as Private Jong Kyong-hong – suggests he and his comrades were ill-prepared for modern warfare, particularly the explosive drones that both sides use to target the enemy. A rudimentary stick-figure drawing on one page of the diary shows one soldier, referred to as “bait,” standing in the open to draw a drone closer while two of his comrades attempt to shoot it out of the sky.
“Even at the cost of my life, I will carry out the Supreme Commander’s orders without hesitation,” Pte. Jong writes on one of the pages published on social media by the Ukrainian military. “I will show the world the bravery and sacrifice of Kim Jong-un’s special forces.”
Mr. Lee said the North Koreans – who have lived their entire lives in Mr. Kim’s “hermit kingdom,” with almost no information about the outside world – would have little idea about who they were fighting or why. He said the deployment was a cynical way for Mr. Kim’s regime to make money. Moscow is paying Pyongyang US$2,000 per soldier, per month, according to South Korean media reports citing South Korea’s intelligence service.
The 57-year-old former South Korean Marine took a meandering route to the same war. After his military service, Mr. Lee became a television cameraman but lost that job in the 1998 financial crisis. Afterward, he moved from one country to another, trying his hand at an array of small business ventures, such as importing face masks to Europe during the pandemic. In 2023, he saw a photo exhibit outside the Ukrainian embassy in Prague of alleged war crimes committed by the Russian army during the first year of the invasion. He decided to enlist in the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine, believing it was his duty to fight for the country’s freedom, just as United Nations soldiers had fought seven decades earlier to defend what is now South Korea.
“I’m just showing my respect to my heroes. The UN, 16 countries, saved South Korea, they saved my country,” he said, referring to the 1950-53 Korean War, which saw U.S.-led international forces liberate Seoul and drive North Korean and Chinese troops back behind what is now the Demilitarized Zone. “Now Ukraine is the same,” Mr. Lee added. “The whole world should be helping Ukraine.”
This past November, first responders in Kyiv take stock of the damage that a North Korean-made Hwasong-11 missile caused at a residential building.
Several South Koreans joined the International Legion early in the war, though most left after Seoul began arresting veterans of the conflict upon their return home. Mr. Lee said he was aware he was violating South Korea’s 2022 ban on travel to Ukraine, an offence punishable by up to a year in prison, but decided to stay and fight.
Shortly after joining the legion, he was sent to the front line near the Russian-occupied city of Bakhmut. Foreign fighters were often used to fill gaps in the 1,000-kilometre-long front line as Ukraine suffered a growing infantry shortage.
“They need front line soldiers. Nobody wants to do front line,” he said in broken English, which he admits sometimes mangled communications with his comrades-in-arms. (Mr. Lee also doesn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian.)
Mr. Lee lived to take a picture of the shrapnel hole in his hat, which was covering a helmet that protected his head. He would not be so lucky at avoiding injury a few months later.
He was struck in the head on Christmas Day, 2023, the bullet glancing off his helmet after piercing the tuque he wore over it. A little more than six months later, an explosive drone crashed into his trench on the southern Zaporizhzhia front.
He said he would have died from blood loss if not for the six tourniquets he applied to his mangled left arm. His military training, he said, saved his life where a North Korean soldier in the same position likely would have died. “The North Koreans don’t know that when you see a drone, you stop moving. The North Koreans don’t know how to use a tourniquet,” he said.
Mr. Lee’s left arm, right up to the shoulder, is now a bionic limb that was built for him by the Superhumans Center, a specialized facility in western Ukraine that assists the country’s war amputees. He is still learning to use it, teaching himself how to hold things and type with his black metal hand.
He has avoided telling his parents, as well as his fiancée in Thailand, about the severity of his injury for fear of worrying them.
Mr. Lee is getting used to his bionic limb from the Superhumans Center.
Despite it all, he said he wants to remain in Ukraine. His short-term plan is to try to use social media to explain the war to people in Asia, where he said there is little awareness of the conflict. He also thinks he can still be of service to the Ukrainian military.
He said he has asked the Ukrainian government if he can put his language skills to use on the “I Want To Live” hotline that was set up to help Russian soldiers who want to surrender. The hotline now offers similar Korean-language advice to North Koreans who no longer want to fight.
Mr. Lee doesn’t know yet if his offer will be accepted, but he knows what he would tell his fellow Koreans if he got the chance to communicate with them. “I would tell them: ‘Please save your lives – go back to North Korea. Go back to your mom and dad.”