North Korea News Podcast by NK News - North Korean troops’ fake IDs, and what’s left of the DPRK Embassy in Damascus

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

The Ukrainian military claims it seized fake identification documents of North Korean soldiers killed in action in Kursk, the latest evidence that DPRK troops disguised as Russian soldiers are supporting Moscow’s war effort. NK News Deputy Managing Editor Alannah Hill joins the podcast to discuss the latest news about DPRK troops in the region, as […]

Welcome to a new realm of insights into the Korean Peninsula. At Korea Risk Group, we delve deep into the complexities of North and South Korea, offering bespoke analyses that empower decision makers. Whether you're in government, business or academia, our tailored solutions provide clarity in an opaque region. Let our team guide your strategy with data-driven insights and on-the-ground intelligence. Step into a world of informed decision making and visit KoreaRiskGroup dot com today. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetsluyt and today it is Tuesday, the 24th of December, Christmas Eve. Welcome on the show, Alana.

Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be back. I feel like it's been ages. It does feel like it's been a while. Yes. Did you have a good festival yesterday? I did. Yeah, I actually had the day off yesterday. So I'm a little bit behind on what went down. I tried to catch up this morning, but the day to day things can change so quickly. It's never a boring day in Korea. There's always something going on. This is why journalists in Korea should never ever take a vacation because you're always going to miss something. Exactly. And we had Brian's famous last words.

He's not dead. The martial law week. He was like, oh, I think it's going to be a quiet week. And then we had martial law. He said, oh my gosh. We always think to ourselves, we're also in the evening time, come around 6 p.m. when we say, oh, looks like we might be able to finish early today.

And then everyone in the office is like, no, don't say that. I think that's one of those moments this year where hopefully all of us can remember where we were when we heard Marsha Laws just being declared. I know exactly where I was I was at home on my couch just in shock and total disbelief is this real? I yeah. Where were you? I was getting ready for bed and my wife was watching I think a video on YouTube that someone had sent her and said, Marsha Law has just been declared.

And I said, I don't think so. Let's turn on the TV, get on the Yonhap News or the YTN and see what's really going on. And then I did and my jaw resounded off the floor. It was such a shock. Okay, but we're here to talk about two stories of the last week or so that are relevant today. So where would you like to start? So I wanted to briefly start with some of the Ukraine updates and with some interesting stories from our my excellent colleague Anton who does such a great job of monitoring

just the wave of news and sifting through what potentially could be real, what's not real and the millbloggers. Exactly. If we didn't have Anton, where would we be? Oh, I don't even want to think about it. He's fantastic. So he had two stories yesterday. The first one, I think is the more interesting one, was he came from Ukrainian intelligence talking about these fake ideas. Or ideas that they found on dead North Korean soldiers.

They purport to be North Korean soldiers. So they found these Russian military IDs on these soldiers. Russian IDs. Russian IDs, now later with inconsistencies, the stamps weren't right, Anton said, there was a couple of things that were wrong. And so the names also that they used on these IDs officially in Russian came from these, like a Tuvan.

I think it's a is it an ethnicity or a region? I'm not sure, but they tried to make them look like they weren't North Koreans. Oh, however, the signatures were in Hongul and were North Korean names and more. Chosun Gull, the Koreans would call it. Yeah. So yeah, really interesting. So we had a chat about it this morning because what I couldn't understand is why do you go to the effort of making a fake ID and then have someone sign in their real name? Because obviously the names in Russian and then in Hangul don't match.

But Anton was explaining that perhaps that, you know, they just printed out a stack of IDs, handed them out to these North Korean soldiers and they just sign, you know, it could be something as simple as that. The names on the IDs, are they Korean names written in Cyrillic alphabet? No. So in the Cyrillic alphabet, they're Tuvan style names. And Google tells me that Tuvans are a Turkic ethnic group indigenous to Siberia that live in Tuva, Mongolia and China. Right. OK, I didn't know that.

But then their actual signatures were in Hong Kong. Well, that is I mean, yeah. Why would you do that? Well, it seems like maybe, yeah, as Anton said, it could be something as simple as they were handed these out in a queue of people and just signed. And the person who was supposed to give the instructions, whatever you do, don't sign your name in Chosun girl. That person wasn't there that or was giving the instructions in Russian maybe yeah so

that was an interesting one these are ideas that have been found on dead soldiers yes correct yes okay so we do have now if this is all you know if this all checks out that this is North Korean kills on the battlefield yeah yeah and so this morning Zelensky on his Twitter, he put that number at dead and wounded at 3,000. Of North Koreans. Of North Koreans, yeah. So the latest from Seoul, I think, was around 1,000.

So it's quite a lot more than that, obviously. But again, as Anton and I were chatting this morning, of that 3,000, not sure how many is wounded, not sure how many is dead. But that was the figure he had this morning from North Koreans fighting on the front lines. We can only imagine, we can only speculate here listeners that any South Korean observers or intelligence officers who are over there embedded

with or working with the Ukrainians that would be very, very eager to talk to any injured North Korean found on the battlefield. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think that'll be a really interesting next development in this story because it's inevitable really. Yeah. Or at least I think it is. Well, if they're there, yeah, then it's inevitable that eventually somebody will be

captured or will turn themselves in or will go away. Well, or we'll get lost. I mean, there's all sorts of possibilities, ways that soldiers can end up at enemy hands. Absolutely, yeah. So, we'll have to wait for that next development. And then the other story he wrote yesterday, just briefly, actually came from Moscow and was talking about how North Koreans were actually observing these huge military drills in September, I believe. So it just again kind of highlights how long this cooperation has been going on. Right. I mean, when that mutual defense treaty was signed, what was that? That was in the summer, right? Yes, June or July.

But clearly there'd been talks of, you know, maybe potential military cooperation. North Koreans were observers at these big drills. And then October, I believe, was the first time that we had reports about actual troop deployment. So kind of all lines up really. Right, gosh. Yeah. Wow, alright. So that is news from the front. What else have we got that's been big this week? The second story, an excellent piece from your fellow countryman, Mr. Ifang Bremer. Who's on vacation in the home country right now. How do you say Happy Christmas in Dutch? Who is, yeah, a pretty good Christmas feast. Okay. He's probably having lots of what pea soup and croquettes and olive oil. And while that's coming up for New Year's Eve, but anyway, yeah.

Have a great time there, Ifang, if you're listening. Hello, Ifang. He had an excellent, excellent story from Syria. So he actually worked with a fixer who went to the North Korean Embassy in Damascus. And so he wrote, of course, link it in the show notes, but he wrote about what she could see, what was left of the embassy, and potential reports that there's people still there. Despite reports last week we had that came from Moscow that all the North Korean Embassy had been evacuated. Right.

Really interesting, good pictures as well. And the fixer did a fantastic job about talking to people in the neighborhood. embassy had been evacuated. Really interesting, good pictures as well. And the picture did a fantastic job about talking to people in the neighborhood. So the neighbors of that building, people that worked around there and what they could see and what they saw as the North Koreans were evacuating. So yeah, really good story. I did see that. It was a remarkable story there. Yes. Yeah. And it seems that people are still there in the North Korean. Yeah. They haven't all just run away. Yeah. So one of the neighbours and

that's actually I think works in the building, maybe the basement of the building. I can't exactly remember but had talked about they can hear the generator still running and I think maybe I've seen people come or go or I'm not a hundred percent sure maybe heard people. But yeah I remember definitely about hearing the generator which is is obviously, you know, someone has to turn that on and off. So there has to be somebody still in there. And now it could just still be local staff.

We don't know. Yes, it could be, you know, of course, in any situation where there is some sort of what, civil war or regime change or evolution, if you're a foreign embassy in that country, one of the first things you want to do is remove all sensitive materials and destroy that which you cannot remove and the North Koreans have been in Syria for decades yes so they have a lot of papers to either burn or move out of there. Which they had done according to Yifang's story, it was neighbors talking it's the smell of burning right and apparently had been going on for a few, you know, a while before they evacuated. So

that was definitely a priority. Yeah. And that's what I remember talking to somebody years ago, who lived on the US Embassy compound here in Seoul with the Marines whose task was to go into the embassy and basically remove and destroy documents and things, not to get people out, but to protect secrets. Wow interesting. But the other thing of course you want to do is make sure that your building remains in good order so that if in some future administration you can come back to that country that you don't end up with a trash building where everything's been looted. Exactly. They haven't just left the doors open

for the fixer to walk in. No no no no no she tried to enter and I don't think she could. Right. But yeah, really, really good piece. And also follows on from a piece we had a contributor piece last week talking about, like you say, what we could learn if we have access to these documents or even people on the ground or, you know, there's a lot that we could learn about Syria's relationship with North Korea and potential weapons cooperation over the years with the fall of Assad. So yeah, really interesting story and hopefully more interesting things to come from that. I remember a couple of years ago we

did a story here on NK News about documents found at a abandoned construction site in I believe it was Namibia, a fixer down there. It was some big construction project that North Korea was working on there and they had a building where the North Korean workers sort of lived and had their office and they left behind documents pertaining to the construction. Wow. I mean nothing of sensitive nature like weapons, but still interesting things to learn just from papers left lying around.

Yeah. So yeah, you can learn so much from that. And I mean, imagine talking to those North Korean diplomats before they were exfiltrated from Syria. It must've been interesting for them, but also potentially scary, because A, they're watching the country that they're allied with going down in flames,

or the government of that country. But B, they may also be wondering, well, will we be up for sort of re-education when we go back to North Korea? Yeah, these are Syrians who have seen a North Koreans who have seen a revolution in Syria. They may be taking back some dangerous ideas. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Very scary. I can't I can't imagine.

And it was employees and a lot of their families as well. From what neighbors said, they were when they were watching them be evacuated. You know, they said all these luxuries SUVs pulled up. Appeared to be Russian guards and Russian guy helping the North Korean flexible train. Yeah. Yeah. And then once again, they're close cooperation there on the military. Yeah. So yeah, from Syria to Russia is quite a culture shock, I imagine. Yeah. Wow. OK.

Good luck to those people wherever they are now. And have you got any final thoughts to leave us with? Just want to say happy Christmas to everyone. Thank you to all our listeners and happy New Year as well. Thank you very much, Alana. Yeah, happy Christmas to you and we'll see you in 2025 with more stories and no quiet weeks. Of course, there's always something going on here in Korea for better or worse. True that exactly. Thanks Jaco. Thank you. Best sellers unveiled at NK News Shop. Step out in style with our top-selling apparel from the NK News Shop. Fly high with the Air Koryo t-shirt celebrating DPRK's golden era of aviation in vintage airline chic. the world. Thank you. today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode, and to our post-recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises,

awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you, and listen again next time.