North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has met the families of soldiers killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine and expressed his “deep condolences”, state media says.
In a special ceremony held on Friday Kim was seen comforting bereaved families and presenting them portraits of their dead loved ones wrapped in the North Korean flag.
South Korea believes the North has sent some 15,000 troops to aid Russia’s war with Ukraine, along with missiles and long range weapons. In return it is believed North Korea received food, money and technical help.
North Korea only acknowledged its role in the foreign conflict in April, admitting that some of its soldiers had been killed.
In January, Western officials told the BBC they believed at least 1,000 of the troops sent from North Korea had been killed in three months, with several thousand more wounded but more recent estimates have put the figure closer to 600 killed.
Friday’s ceremony was the second of its kind in a week. During the event, Kim said he was filled with “sorrow” at failing to bring the soldiers back alive, pledging to build a monument in their honour and to and look after their children.
“I thought a lot about other martyrs’ families who were not present [at the previous ceremony]… So, I had this meeting arranged as I wanted to meet and console the bereaved families of all the heroes and relieve them of their sorrow and anguish even a little,” KCNA reported Kim as saying.
Kim is due to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin in China next week when he travels to attend a military parade marking Japan’s surrender in World War II.
It will be their third meeting in two years at a time when Moscow and Pyongyang are deepening their cooperation and relations between both countries have reached a new level.
Last October, Kim sent Russian leader Vladimir Putin a birthday messages, calling him his closest comrade.
That same month Putin introduced a bill to ratify a military pact he made with Kim, which pledges that Russia and North Korea will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.
North Korea may have some 1.28 million active soldiers but until the Ukraine deployment its army had no recent experience of combat operations overseas.