As soldiers fighting for Ukraine try to hold on to the hundreds of square kilometers they captured in Russia’s Kursk region in August, some face relentless waves of determined North Korean troops, Russian units with improved tactics and Ukraine’s fighting faced with exhaustion and declining morale.
“I honestly don’t think we can hold it out much longer,” said Chapi, a foreign fighter who spoke to CBC in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine, about 15 km from the Russian border.
“I hope they just freeze the pipes for six months. Give the politicians time to try to negotiate.”
Chapi, like other soldiers CBC News spoke with, is identified only by his call sign, according to Ukrainian military rules.
He and other members of his assault unit describe a deteriorating situation on the Kursk Front, where there are not enough troops or weapons to counter the Russian military, which is reinforced by thousands of skilled North Korean soldiers.
When Ukraine seized territory in a surprise invasion in August 2024, it invigorated the military and Ukrainian public, who were weary after seeing Russia continue to seize land in the country’s southeast.
But in recent months Ukraine has lost the conquered territories.
Chapi, who has been fighting in Ukraine since 2022, says peace talks cannot come soon enough as the military is short of troops and mobilized men with no experience are desperately trying to fill gaps on the front lines.
Kursk could be an object of negotiation
The last time Chapi described this fear was during the fight Bakhmut which lasted almost a year as Russia sent wave after wave Wagner mercenary fighters and convicts into battle.
He says the difference this time is that the North Koreans are much better trained and drone warfare has advanced so quickly that the threat from the air is almost constant.
Ukrainian officials say they seized the area in Kursk to create a buffer zone, but now with US President Donald Trump As they push for an end to the war, there is speculation that Kursk is also a bargaining chip that can be used in future negotiations.
But only if Ukraine sticks to it.
Chapi says many of the soldiers on the front lines now are not of the same caliber as before. Instead of volunteering to fight, they were forced to do so through conscription.
“A lot of these people don’t want to be there. They just want to survive the war.”
Soldiers fighting for Ukraine, Chapi and Google, are now fighting North Korean reinforcements in the war against Russia. They describe the North Koreans as “aggressive” and relentless.
“We are all tired,” says the soldier
Last April, the Ukrainian government lowered the Mobilization age from 27 to 25 years. But U.S. officials have urged Ukraine to reduce its weapons even further, something the administration has so far refused to do, saying Ukraine’s main problem is a lack of weapons, not troops.
A 26-year-old soldier who goes by the call sign Google and fights alongside Chapi had just married and was working as a sales manager when he was drafted nine months ago.
“I want to get back to civilian life quickly,” he told CBC News.
“We are all tired. We want peace.”
In December, Ukraine’s president said more than 42,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and hundreds of thousands injured since the full-scale invasion began.
While the government claims that the Ukrainian military consists of 800,000 troops, the Prosecutor General’s Office has claimed that there are more than 800,000 troops 100,000 Since the war began in February 2022, soldiers have been charged under the country’s desertion laws.
Ukrainian media have reported that an investigation has been launched into the 155th Mechanized Brigade over allegations that 1,700 of the men had already left before the unit’s combat deployment.
Inadequate training, soldiers report
With its ranks depleted, Ukraine granted one late last year amnesty This would allow soldiers who were absconders to avoid punishment if they returned to their units.
Voodoo, another foreign volunteer who works as a medic and is stationed in Kursk, said there were “good brigades, mediocre brigades and terrible brigades” scattered across the front.
He said that while Ukraine tries to provide new soldiers with basic training, he believes it is often inadequate and amounts to a “box-ticking” exercise.
He described how he recently attended a course where, at the start of each class, the instructor told troops to just pretend there were no drones in the sky, which he said was completely unrealistic.
“Of course I can pretend to fight on the moon or ride a unicorn, if you will. But that is not the war we are fighting,” he said.
“So why even bother doing the training?”
North Korean reinforcements
Experts believe that the number of Russian military deaths is significantly higher than that of Ukraine. Independent Russian journalists who have been tracking the dead and wounded put the death toll at around 150,000.
But Russia has a much larger population and now uses imported troops from North Korea.
The soldiers fighting for Ukraine said they were amazed at how small the North Koreans they saw on the battlefield were compared to the Russians, but said they were clearly skilled and unflappable. He said their movements were more aggressive and their shooting more precise.
Chapi said they were deploying more men to launch attacks, and he said he saw one group rush forward while a commander shouted at them from behind.
“I don’t know what he yelled, but I can tell you it wasn’t like, ‘Okay, now come back,'” he said.
“He was like he was sending them all the time. And that happened after the North Koreans suffered losses.”
Soldiers fighting for Ukraine and using the call signs Chapi and Google see a deteriorating situation at the front and want an end to the fighting.
Unlike the Russians, according to soldier Google, the North Koreans are bringing back all of their dead. There are some reports about this many up to 1,000 of them have already been killed in Kursk.
While Ukraine did two men captured According to Google, the North Koreans he met, who are currently imprisoned in Kiev, refuse to become prisoners of war.
He said he had personally seen some decide to blow themselves up with grenades rather than be captured.
Dream about going home
Google, who spoke to CBC during a three-day break, dreams of starting a family and leaving the front lines for good, but he’s waiting to hear more of what Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have to say.
Asked what kind of peace deal he would support, he is unsure but says it might require peacekeepers from other countries to patrol the border and enforce a ceasefire.
If this were to be part of a hypothetical deal, Zelensky said it would require at least 200,000 troops.
Yaryi, 25, another soldier from the same assault squad who was previously an MMA fighter before enlisting, said there is only one way a peace deal can work: if Russia withdraws from territory it occupies, including Crimea, which it seized in 2014 illegally annexed.
“If they get 20 percent of our territory, that is not peace,” he said. “They would just attack again in three or four years.”
