8.55 a.m.: South Korea’s intelligence service NIS confirms Ukrainian reports about two North Korean prisoners of war. As South Korea’s official news agency Yonhap reports, one of the captured soldiers said during his interrogation that he had no idea he was being sent to a war zone. He assumed that his posting was just a training assignment.
According to Yonhap, the soldier also stated that the North Korean forces fighting on the Russian side had suffered “significant losses.” The NIS has been cooperating closely with the Ukrainian secret service since North Korea sent soldiers to Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says his forces have taken two North Korean soldiers as prisoners of war in Russia’s Kursk region. The men survived despite injuries and were taken to Kiev, where the Ukrainian secret service was interrogating them. Zelenskyy announces that the press will also have access to the prisoners. “The world needs to know the truth of what is happening.” Read more about it here.
8.30 a.m.: According to its air force, Ukraine was attacked by Russia with a total of 94 drones during the night. 60 of them were shot down. The other 34 were “lost”. The wording should be understood as an indication that the unmanned aircraft were diverted with the help of electronic interference.
2 a.m.: Moscow has accused outgoing US President Joe Biden of endangering the stability of global energy supplies with new sanctions against Russia. At the end of Biden’s “inglorious term in office,” Washington is trying to inflict “at least some damage” on the Russian economy, even at the price of destabilizing world markets, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said on Saturday. It announced that “Washington’s hostile actions will of course not go unanswered.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that the Biden administration was trying to “leave as heavy a legacy as possible” to US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to White House deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh, these are the largest US sanctions ever against the Russian energy sector. This takes action against “a key source of income from Russia’s brutal and illegal war in Ukraine,” said outgoing US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.