This is great news. OTOH, these deserters condemned 3 generations of their family back home.
Yeah they’ll do that. You gotta make people want to stay
my first thought when nk sent troops was what an opportunity to get out of nk.
NK probably loves the idea of less people?
They aren't going to want those 3000 troops coming back and talking about their time in the west.
I dunno the NK troops at least appear to have boots, so coming back and telling stories of how the 'western' Russian troops don't even have shoes or ammo is probably decent propaganda for the regime.
Look at night time satellite imagery. South Korea looks like an island; the northern half of the peninsula is almost entirely dark.
The street lamps along their route to Ukraine will be enough to give them culture shock.
18 doesn't seem like many. North Korea must have sent thousands
Around 10k total I think
I think I read somewhere 3000 to that unit / region
I hope they all find better lives and live them.
I just hope they are all single and don't have families left.
Imagine living in a 1950's time bubble. You are being constantly told through propaganda that your military force is cutting edge and that it can easily overwhelm any enemy.
Then you are being sent to fight on a battlefield where everyone has better gear than you, where you are confronted to weapons that are so far advanced beyond anything that you've ever seen they might as well be magic. Then you see said weapons completely obliterate your comrades without giving you a chance to even see the enemy who operates them.
You only obeyed so far because you feared what your government might do to you if you didn't. Now you've found something that you fear even more.
You're also used to standing around guarding a border all the time, not experiencing actual combat at all.
And by "guarding the border" it really means "shooting anyone trying to escape"
imagine them seeing the drone for the first time.
Hearing
Not sure they even hear them. I've watched 1,000 Russians die, clueless anything was targeting them.
North Korean battle theme in Ukraine:
I imagine the sound from when you lose on The Price is Right.
With the yodeling guy going up the ramp just before!
Well that's one way to escape North Korea I guess.
How pathetic does Russia have to be to be bringing NORTH KOREAN troops into the war. It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
What's pathetic about it? Cannon fodder is cannon fodder. They can hold a rifle just as well as any other person, and they can use it to kill. Acting like getting foreign troops helping you is somehow beneath you in a war is insane
I'm just saying there isn't anything further down in the barrel.
Sadly, this.
Fictional, but
ONE OUT OF TWO GETS RIFLE. THE ONE WITHOUT, FOLLOWS HIM! WHEN THE ONE WITH THE RIFLE GETS KILLED, THE ONE WHO IS FOLLOWING PICKS UP THE RIFLE AND SHOOTS!
I know a good number of North Koreans would love to defect if there weren't going to be consequences for their families back home. Put those people in a situation where they can just disappear and have it explained as being honorably slain in combat? Seems like a golden opportunity if the country they defect to doesn't just send them back.
I know a good number of North Koreans...
How do you know so many North Koreans?
I'm a quarter NK. All the NKs I know are dead tho
Hah, got me there.
I did actually meet a North Korean once when I spent a fair bit of time in Seoul during a study abroad program, but she "defected" as a child (read: smuggled into the South via China by some Christian group) and didn't really have much recollection of what life in the North was even like. Definitely not many though!
One of my parents was in North Korea multiple times in the 80s as a tour guide from the Eastern Block, I remember hearing the stories about it when I was a child.
Cameras being taken, poverty housing blocked off with walls, fake buildings and rooms, US soldiers watching them from the other side of the DMZ “negotiation building”.
I always took these stories for granted, and didn’t realize for a long time how special and unique these experiences that were. When I tell my Western EU colleagues they always drop their jaws.
One is more than a lot of us can claim.
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