Summary

A captured Russian soldier claimed North Korean troops stationed in Russia’s Kursk region endangered their allies by mistakenly firing on their own unit.

Video footage purportedly shows the soldier describing how North Koreans fired in the wrong direction during an assault, reportedly killing two Russian soldiers. North Korea has deployed around 8,000 troops to support Russia, raising international concerns about escalating conflict dynamics.

In return, North Korea is reportedly receiving money, food, and space technology from Russia. Moscow plans to form multiple units of North Korean soldiers integrated with Russian ethnic minorities.

  • Hubi@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    These guys have been thrown into the middle of a conflict of similar looking people wearing similar camo and using similar weapons while speaking almost indistinguishable languages. This is probably not the only time this will happen.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      I mean, considering that the russians are (alllegedly) calling them “chinese” to be bigoted… that probably IS going to be the official line.

  • SarcasticMan@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Hell yeah, this might be the timeline where Best Korea fools everyone and takes over both Russia and Ukraine moves all their people there, and opens a chain of kimchi-focused fast-casual restaurant/DahnMuDo centers called Kim’s Ki Brain and Body Center.

  • filister@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I really feel sorry for those guys, they are recruited to fight someone else’s war in a foreign country and are literally exchanged for food, money and space technology like a cattle.

    This shows how much the NK government values the lives of their citizens. Grim!

    • Jumi@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The South Koreans did the same in Vietnam and it is said it kickstarted their economy, maybe it’s the same here.

      !But not really!<

  • FergleFFergleson@infosec.pub
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    2 months ago

    Not surprising really. Look back at the history of war and see how many occasions there was a friendly fire incident under the best of circumstances. Russia has already had numerous, often high-profile FF incidents in this war alone. Add in a completely foreign group of fighters speaking a different language, etc, etc… Pretty much inevitable.

  • Blackmist
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    2 months ago

    Amusing as that is, I’m pretty sure it’s happened in every war since time began, and will continue to happen until we’re back at sticks and stones.

    • Th3D3k0y@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m surprised Ukraine and Russia didn’t get together at the start of the war to decide who was skins and who was shirts so they knew what team was what. Would have been easier for the NKs to remember which white person was the bad one.

    • Drusas@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      I read somewhere a few days ago that there’s supposed to be something like one translator per 30 (?) North Koreans. I don’t know if it’s accurate.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.

      I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.

      One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

      The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.

      https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil

      The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.

      Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.

      In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea

      The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.

      Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.

      As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.

      One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.

        Like… The front line, land mined areas…

        I honestly feel bad for them. At least Russian soldiers have/had access to info outside their country. This guys are sent there believing they are the best equipped, most advanced army in the world, and they will just replace the fallen conscripts.

    • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Honestly I’m a little surprised they don’t make them learn at least some Mandarin or Russian as soldiers, or maybe they do but at higher ranks?

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        The timeframe is pretty short.

        That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I’ve also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won’t stick tightly together post-war.

        Guess we’ll see.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          So, like, it’s prudent to learn a few phrases, “don’t shoot, Russian” or something.

          The problem is that… who’s going to believe them.

  • btaf45@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Ukraine needs to bring in a South Korean resettlement team and tell the North Koreans all they need do is surrender and get their free tickets to South Korea.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    lol I can’t believe even my cynical expectations on the NKs (which are "miscommunicate and get ground into dog food) were too lofty. Well done fellas.