THIS is the chilling moment North Korean soldiers sent out to fight for Vladimir Putin are forced to jog through a snowy no-mans-land while Ukrainian troops pick them out one by one.
Despot Kim Jong-un has sent thousands of his men to die on the frontline of Putin’s illegal war – including in Kursk – a Russian border region taken by Kyiv earlier this year.
On a battlefield in Kursk, some two dozen men claimed to be North Korean fighters (DPRK) huddle together before jogging out towards enemy lines.
Dressed in Russian army fatigues, they make no effort to find cover and instead cross the icy field in clear view of Ukrainian drones.
Some crouch on the ground while others jog almost carelessly up and down the frontline in the drone video.
Ukrainian veteran Vitaliy, 35, told The Times it was “like a dream for our mortars and machinegunners”.
He added: “I don’t know if they all died. But put it this way, the attack was stopped pretty quickly.
“The Wagner group had a simple order: advance or die.
“It looked like exactly the same thing for the Koreans”.
The video captured a battle along the Ukrainian’s left flank on December 15 – as Kyiv’s forces grit their way through another winter at war.
Troops from Pyongyang have suffered “several hundred” casualties while fighting in the last few weeks, according to the White House and US military.
One US official said: “Several hundred casualties is our latest estimate that the DPRK has suffered.
“This includes everything from… light wounds up to being KIA [killed in action].”
Other drone videos released by Ukraine’s military claimed to show North Korean fighters on the front line and the bodies of slain Russian and Korean soldiers stacked together.
One clip reportedly shows the bodies of dozens of dead Korean soldiers laid out by Putin’s forces after another major clash in the Kursk region.
Meanwhile Ukrainian premier Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Russians are burning the faces off of dead North Korean soldiers so they remain unidentifiable.
Today marked Putin’s deadliest day of war so far, with 2,200 soldiers killed.
This brings the total casualties on the Russian side to 770,420, according to the Russian media outlet Pravda.
Almost 20,000 drones, 10,000 tanks and hundreds of warships, planes and helicopters have all been eliminated from the dictator’s arsenal, Kyiv has claimed.
Russia’s staggering death toll marks the Russian tyrant’s most damaging period of his over 1,000-day-old conflict so far.
The previous highest was 2,000 on November 29.
UK Defence Secretary John Healey has warned the 600-mile Russia-Ukraine frontline is now the most unstable it has been since February 2022.
Putin called on his pals over in North Korea for extra support to fight back against a surging Kyiv earlier this year.
Supreme Leader Kim handed over around 10,000 troops to be trained by Russia before they were deployed.
