It comes amid multiple reports of up to 12,000 North Korean troops preparing to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.
A picture purporting to show a North Korean flag next to a Russian one on a Ukrainian battlefield is doing the rounds on several military blogs but some claim it is photoshopped—here is everything we know about it so far.
Both Ukraine and South Korea have said that thousands of North Korean troops are being trained to fight for Moscow in Ukraine, with around 1,500 already reportedly deployed there.
A North Korean envoy to the United Nations denied these claims, calling them „groundless rumors“ on Monday, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported, while the Russian Embassy in Seoul insisted in a Facebook post that its cooperation with North Korea was „within the framework of international law.“
Several Russian bloggers, including Military Informant (@milinfolive_man), have posted a photo of Moscow’s flag side-by-side with North Korea’s „near the recently liberated village of Tsukurino in the Pokrovsky direction.“
„It looks like the fighters on the ground decided to tease the enemy“, the channel wrote on Telegram.
But the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Andriy Kovalenko, has said the photo could be photoshopped, used „as propaganda of fear against Ukraine“, reported ASTRA, a Telegram channel reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war.