North Korean soldiers “disguised” as Russian fighters from Siberia clashed with Ukrainian troops, kyiv’s Defense Minister said, although the casualty count among Pyongyang’s forces remains unclear.

North Korean troops deployed alongside Moscow’s own forces were dressed to look like Russian recruits from the Buryatia region of eastern Siberia, Rustem Umerov told South Korean broadcaster KBS.

Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence services have said in recent weeks that North Korea was sending between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to Russia to reinforce Moscow’s war effort against Kyiv.

Umerov said there had been “small-scale clashes” between Ukrainian and North Korean troops so far, but Ukraine could not yet verify this. How many casualties had North Korea suffered? or how many soldiers had become prisoners of war.

An anonymous Ukrainian official said The New York Times in an article published Tuesday that the fighting involving North Korean troops was limited, likely intended to test Ukraine’s lines for weak spots.

Pyongyang’s troops joined Russia’s 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade, the official said. The US-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said Tuesday that Russia is likely trying to integrate North Korean fighters into the Russian military structure, rather than having “separate North Korean units fighting under Russian command.”

A US official told the Times A significant number of North Korean troops were killed, but no further details were provided.

“We have identified contacts with North Korean forces, but we expect further clashes in the coming weeks and will analyze and review accordingly,” Umerov added.

He said up to 15,000 troops could end up supporting Russian forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, where Moscow has been fighting to wrest Ukrainian control of a section of Russian territory near the border since early August.

He Pentagon He said on Monday that 10,000 North Korean troops were in Kursk. At the end of October, the US Secretary of Defense lloyd austin He said the United States had not yet detected North Korean troops engaged in combat, but that they would “join the fight against Ukraine in the coming days.”

Many Western countries have denounced the arrival of North Korean troops to fight in the largest ground war in Europe since World War II as a dangerous escalation of the devastating and bloody conflict.

“The first battles with North Korean soldiers open a new page of instability in the world,” said the Ukrainian president. Volodymyr Zelensky he said in his Tuesday afternoon speech. “We must do everything possible to make Russia take this step of expanding the war, to really escalate it, to make this step a failure.”

Andriy Kovalenko, head of countering disinformation at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said Monday that the first North Korean troops “have already been attacked” in Kursk.

The next day, Kovalenko said the North Koreans were “in Russian military uniform” alongside Russian units in Kursk, learning how to use various types of drones against Ukrainian forces. The United States has previously said that Moscow has provided North Korean troops with Russian military uniforms.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service spy agency said last month that an initial group of 1,500 North Korean fighters had traveled to Russia and were equipped with russian military uniforms, Russian-made weapons and false documents claiming that the fighters were residents of Siberian regions.

“We expect more commitments in the coming weeks,” Umerov said.

Pyongyang has supplied Moscow with a significant number of missiles and millions of shells. Its support, kyiv’s military intelligence chief said earlier, makes North Korea the most formidable Russian ally Ukraine can contend with. In recent months, Kyiv has doggedly attacked ammunition depots storing North Korean munitions.