These figures have not been officially published, but a clue was found in a new monument.
Photo: KCNA
According to a BBC investigation, based on satellite images and official photographs of a new memorial in North Korea, approximately 2,300 North Korean soldiers who fought on Moscow's side in the war Russia is waging against Ukraine have likely died.
In October 2025, DPRK leader Kim Jong Un ordered the construction of a memorial in Pyongyang's Hwasong district to commemorate servicemen who died in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The BBC analyzed several photographs published by KCNA, which show that each memorial wall is divided into approximately 14 sections, marked at the top by lines of gray stone.
Names are already inscribed on nine of these sections; according to BBC calculations, based on the spacing between groups of names, each section contains about 16 columns.
As seen in close-ups of the eastern wall, each column contains the names of eight fallen soldiers (typically consisting of three syllables or characters).
BBC
Nine sections with 16 columns and eight names each amount to 1152 names on one wall, and consequently, 2304 names on two walls.
Chung Seong-hak, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, agrees with the BBC's assessment.
"The memorial walls have the names of fallen soldiers inscribed in very small font. Considering the surface area and text density, the number of people whose names are recorded there likely reaches several thousand," he says.
An exact figure cannot be determined due to the lack of higher-resolution images, but the BBC's estimate is close to the number announced by South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS).
BBC
In September 2025, it reported that about 2,000 North Korean soldiers were killed and another 2,700 wounded. And in February of this year, the NIS announced that about 6,000 of the 11,000 DPRK servicemen sent to Russia were killed or wounded. The intelligence agency did not provide a separate breakdown for killed and wounded.
As a satellite image taken in early April shows (it was provided to the BBC by the South Korean research company SI Analytics), there are about 140 graves on the western side of the memorial cemetery and 138 on the other.
According to researcher Chung from the Korea Institute for National Unification (he is not affiliated with SI Analytics), the memorial complex building appears to be a columbarium where burial urns are stored.
"It seems that the entire wall is filled with cells for storing remains, arranged in a grid pattern," he explains.
"The memorial hall is a three-story building, and even without considering offices and exhibition areas, the internal storage alone can accommodate at least 1,000 sets of remains," says Chung.
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