North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) attends a welcoming ceremony for Korean People’s Army soldiers at he plaza of the April 25 House of Culture in Pyongyang, North Korea, in December. The troops returned from deployment in Russia’s Kursk region, removing min es during the Ukraine War. File Photo by North Korean Central News Agency
July 27 (UPI) — Executive director’s note: These are remarks Jihyun Park presented at an event Monday titled “The Role of Civil Society in the Republic of Korea and Ukraine and Global Solidarity in Addressing War Crimes.”
The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.
Thank you so much for inviting me to this event.
I want to begin today not with statistics, but with a face — the face of a young soldier.
In the late 1990s, during the devastating famine in north Korea, my younger brother was a soldier.
At that time, the regime’s economic system had utterly collapsed, because East socialism countries collapsed down especially Soviet Union.
Yet, the military created special units tasked with extortion — forcing young soldiers to collect and submit ‘loyalty funds’ directly to the regime.
In a starving nation, fulfilling this quota was an impossible mission. Failure meant brutal punishment, or worse, being sent to a political prison camp. Desperate and terrified, my brother’s entire unit fled.
While the regime turned a blind eye to ordinary starving deserters, they hunted my brother relentlessly.
Military officers descended upon our home. Public wanted posters were papered across every apartment building in our district, and soldiers lay in ambush inside our own house.
My brother was captured once, but he managed a desperate escape, declaring he would rather die running than return to the hands of the military.
He made it to China, but the north Korean agents did not give up. They tracked our every footprint.
Ultimately, my brother was forcibly repatriated back to north Korea.
To this day, I do not know if he is alive or dead. But, the horror did not stop there. It was a complete forced disappearance. Not only my brother, but the homeowners who sheltered us in north Korea, and the people who helped us hide in China, all vanished without a trace.
When my brother was hunted down and taken, he was just a young man – the exact same age as the young Ukrainian prisoners of war currently suffering in this brutal conflict.
As a sister who still carries the agonizing weight of a missing brother, I do not just see numbers when I look at the prisoner-of-war crisis in Ukraine. I see human beings. I see my brother.
Just days ago, at the NATO Summit, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met to address the fate of north Korean prisoners of war.
While humanitarian aid packages are linked to this discussion, raising possibilities of refuge in South Korea, we must critically examine the negotiations.
History shows us that geopolitical discussions often turn human lives into bargaining chips, hiding behind motives like financial or military aid.
We must ensure that the ‘free will’ of these soldiers is truly prioritized over diplomatic compromises. The fear of being sent back, often a death sentence, cannot be subject to political maneuvering. Human rights are absolute and not a tool for negotiation.
We must remember that this crisis did not begin overnight.
The world was shocked when the deployment of north Korean combat troops to the Russia-Ukraine war became official in the fall of 2024.
But the truth goes deeper. Starting from 2023, as Russia aggressively moved to dismantle and veto the U.N. Security Council’s North Korea Sanctions Experts Panel, the groundwork was already being laid.
Immediately after weakening that international watchdog, Moscow began quietly bringing in north Korean military personnel under the guise of “overseas laborers.”
The foundation for this dangerous military collusion was established long before the world chose to notice. Therefore, we must look at this conflict with clear eyes.
The Russia-Ukraine war is not a distant, localized conflict between two nations. It is a tectonic shift in global security.
By integrating north Korean forces and resources into Europe’s theater of war, a dangerous bridge has been built — one that links the security of Europe, East Asia and the vast landmass of Eurasia into a single, volatile tinderbox.
A threat to freedom in Ukraine is a direct threat to peace on the Korean Peninsula and a catastrophe for global stability.
Let us be completely honest about what is happening on the ground. The north Korean soldiers sent to Russia are not just on a military deployment. They are being used as disposable cannon fodder for Vladimir Putin’s bloody imperial ambitions.
In return, their blood is transformed into the financial lifeline that keeps Kim Jong Un’s brutal dictatorship alive.
Back in north Korea, thousands of families are left in complete agony, completely unaware of whether their sons are dead or alive in a foreign land they cannot even find on a map.
The cruelty of the Pyongyang regime reached a new peak just last week at the 8th Congress of the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea in Pyongyang. Instead of granting women their basic rights, the regime demanded that north Korean mothers sacrifice their families, ordering them to push their husbands and children to serve the state without question.
I put here additional information because I got that only yesterday, President Zelensky said that North Korea is prepared to send Russia more multiple launch rocket systems and up to 30,000 troops, citing Ukrainian intelligence.
The dictatorship is treating women as mere state-owned breeding machines– utilizing them as tools to systematically harvest and recruit a steady supply of young bodies to be sacrificed in Russia’s war.
This brings us to the urgent and dangerous crisis unfolding right now.
We are hearing reports of potential negotiations where Russia might release captured Ukrainians in exchange for handing over these north Korean prisoners.
As a human being, I deeply understand the agonizing desire of the Ukrainian government to rescue its own citizens and bring its sons and daughters home.
However, we must state clearly and unequivocally: north Korean soldiers are not ordinary prisoners of war. They cannot be treated as mere bargaining chips for a prisoner swap.
We must look back to history. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, the world mistakenly believed that totalitarian imperialism was dead.
But Vladimir Putin never abandoned those dark ambitions.
Today, we are witnessing a terrifying resurgence where Russia, China and north Korea have unified into a shameless axis of dictatorships, aggressively challenging the global rules-based order.
The cruelty of this alliance knows no limits, extending even to the most innocent. The U.K. government sanctioned North Korea’s Songdowon International Children’s Camp under its Russian sanctions regime.
Why? Because Russia has been forcibly abducting Ukrainian children from temporarily occupied territories and deporting them nearly 9,000 kilometers away to this North Korean camp.
There, in Songdowon, these stolen Ukrainian youth are subjected to aggressive political brainwashing and militarized indoctrination aimed at erasing their Ukrainian identity.
Pyongyang is not just sending artillery and cannon fodder; they are actively assisting Putin in the systematic cultural erasure and psychological abuse of Ukraine’s future generation.
This chemical link between Moscow and Pyongyang is not just a violation of sanctions; it is a textbook case of a joint criminal enterprise.
Vladimir Putin already faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for the war crime of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.
By turning north Korean soil into a re-education camp for these stolen children, Kim Jong-un has officially rendered himself an active accomplice to ICC-level war crimes. They must be prosecuted together.
Therefore, I propose today that our civil societies in South Korea and Ukraine establish a Joint Archive for Borderless War Crimes.
Once these north Korean soldiers are safely transferred to South Korea, we must meticulously document their testimonies and systematically submit this evidence to the ICC, ensuring that no dictator can escape accountability.
As someone actively rooted in the United Kingdom, I recognize that I am uniquely positioned to advance this cause.
I will not let our efforts stop at this conference. I pledge to utilize my platform within the British political sphere and my connections in Westminster to bring our findings directly to the UK Parliament and government.
I will advocate for the evidence collected by our Joint Archive to be used to strengthen U.K. sanctions against the Moscow-Pyongyang axis, and to ensure these testimonies are officially channeled to the International Criminal Court.
From London, the heart of Europe’s response to this tyranny, I will serve as your steadfast voice, ensuring that the legal and political weight of the U.K. is fully leveraged to protect these witnesses and bring these dictators to justice.
If Ukraine hands these north Korean soldiers back to Russia, it will be a fatal mistake.
Russia will return them to Pyongyang, where they will face public execution to terrify other potential defectors, and their testimonies of war crimes will be buried forever.
By doing so, the international community would accidentally feed the beast of this dictatorial alliance.
Now is the time for democratic allies to show the true strength of our alliance. To break the axis of Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping, the free world must stand as one solid front.
The most powerful demonstration of this democratic solidarity is to guarantee these soldiers safe passage to the Republic of Korea, strictly honoring their free will and the Third Geneva Convention.
Through letters and moving documentary interviews, they have already begged the international community to be sent to South Korea.
By securing their transfer to South Korea, we do not just protect vulnerable lives – we protect the primary, living eye-witnesses to the unholy alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang.
They hold the vital, undeniable evidence of war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil.
Respecting their free will is the only way to safeguard the truth needed to bring these dictators to justice before the international community.
Furthermore, securing these witnesses is the most direct way to strike at the dark financial lifelines sustaining the Pyongyang regime.
We know that Kim Jong-un relies heavily on Russia and China to bypass international sanctions. Russia pays for north Korean blood and ammunition with cash, oil and military technology, while China continues to act as the economic buffer that keeps the regime afloat.
By bringing these north Korean soldiers safely to South Korea, we dismantle the regime’s most lucrative export: human lives.
When these captured soldiers speak out, their testimonies will expose the exact corporate entities, smuggling networks and financial channels used by Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang to fund this war.
We will not just capture individuals. We will systematically paralyze the financial infrastructure that feeds the north Korean nuclear program and fuels Putin’s war machine. This is how we hit them where it hurts the most.
Distinguished colleagues, 30 years ago, the world looked away when my brother was hunted down and forcibly disappeared. Today, we cannot afford to look away again.
The fate of these north Korean soldiers in Ukraine is the ultimate litmus test for international law, human rights and our shared democratic values.
If we trap them in bureaucratic mislabeling as “refugees,” or if we allow them to be bartered away in political compromises with Russia, we fail.
But if Ukraine, South Korea and European civil societies stand united, we can transform this tragedy into a triumph for justice.
Let us protect these brave witnesses. Let us honor the Geneva Convention.
And let us declare together, from Kyiv to Seoul, that the alliance of freedom will always outlast the axis of tyranny.
Today, I do not stand before you merely as a human rights activist. I stand here as a sister, desperately pleading for the lives of brothers who could have been my own.
Thank you very much.
Jihyun Park, a British Korean Conservative politician and regular contributor to the Korea Regional Review, is a North Korean escapee who fled twice from the country — in 1998, which resulted in a forced repatriation, and in 2008, which was successful. She is a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.
