A man claiming to be a North Korean soldier has appeared in a video on social media and said the Russian military forced him to fight on the front lines in the Kursk region.

In the video, posted on a Telegram channel Thursday, a man with his head and face wrapped in bandages can be heard speaking Korean while lying on a bed.

He says the Russian military falsely promised the North Korean soldiers would not be sent to the front lines, but that they were later forced to participate in the offensive in the country’s Kursk region. 

He said he is the only soldier to have survived from his unit of 40 soldiers.
 
While the authenticity of the video has yet to be verified, the Lithuanian nongovernmental organization Blue/Yellow previously alleged that the Ukrainian military defeated a unit of North Korean soldiers in an armed conflict in Kursk on October 25, killing all but one.

Meanwhile, Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, said while three-thousand North Korean military personnel are in the Kursk region, additional engineers are present in the occupied Donetsk region.