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South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said on Friday that an injured North Korean soldier, captured by Ukrainian forces while fighting for Russia in Kursk, has succumbed to his wounds.

“We confirmed through a friendly nation’s intelligence organization that a North Korean solider, captured alive on Dec. 26, died a short while ago as [his] wounds worsened,” the NIS said.

The South Korean intelligence agency said earlier on Friday it was quickly able to confirm the first capture of a North Korean soldier fighting for Russia thanks to “real-time information sharing” with the above-mentioned “friendly nation’s intelligence organization.”

The soldier was reportedly captured on Thursday while fighting in Kursk, the Russian province invaded by Ukrainian troops in August. 

The Russians, evidently frustrated by their inability to retake Kursk without pulling its most experienced combat troops off the front lines in Ukraine, imported some 12,000 North Korean mercenaries to help with the Kursk counter-offensive. The North Koreans were allegedly outfitted with Russian uniforms and fake identity cards and taught to identify themselves as Yakuts or Buryats, two Siberian ethnic groups with Asian appearances.

Ukrainian officials claim the North Koreans have not fared well in Kursk as they lacked battlefield experience, were unfamiliar with the terrain, enjoyed little knowledge of advanced modern tactics like drone warfare, and labored to overcome a formidable language barrier with their Russian colleagues. 

Ukrainian intelligence blamed the language barrier for a friendly-fire incident on December 14 in which North Korean soldiers fired on an allied Chechen unit in Kursk.

“North Korean troops are being ‘consumed’ for front-line assaults in an unfamiliar battlefield environment of open fields, and they lack the ability to respond to drone attacks,” the NIS assessed this month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on December 16 that the Russians were so eager to conceal the extent of North Korean involvement in Kursk that they were attempting to “literally burn the faces off North Korean soldiers killed in battle.”

“There is not a single reason for North Koreans to fight and die for Putin. And even after they do, Russia has only humiliation for them,” Zelensky said.

The NIS claims over 100 North Korean troops have been killed in Kursk, plus a thousand more injured. Zelensky has suggested the casualties could be much higher — possibly as high as 3,000 killed and wounded. Some hospitals in Kursk have reported treating wounded North Koreans under heavy guard by Russian soldiers.

The first North Korean prisoner of war was captured by Ukrainian special operations troops, which posted photos of the injured prisoner. Independent media outlets could not verify the authenticity of those photos.

Ukrainian forces also claim to have acquired a North Korean soldier’s notebook, with details of drone warfare tactics, and a handwritten note taken from the body of a dead North Korean soldier that appeared to contain birthday greetings for a friend.   

White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Friday condemned the regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang for using North Koreans as cannon fodder in Kursk.

“It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders are treating these troops as expendable and ordering them on hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” Kirby said.