Waiting for the North Koreans on the battlefields of the Ukraine war

Amid reports that Pyongyang’s troops are on the front lines, speculation is rampant among Ukrainian troops about when the first large-scale clashes will happen.

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An emergency worker inspects the pieces of a kamikaze drone with the marking Geran-2 that damaged a five-story apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Oksana Parafeniuk for The Washington Post)
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SUMY, Ukraine — Ukrainian troops fighting inside Russia are bracing for clashes with North Korean forces as officials in Kyiv warn that combat with Russia’s new allies has already begun, marking a dangerous new phase of the war as Donald Trump’s election adds to further uncertainty over Ukraine’s future.

Ukrainian forces are already struggling inside Russia’s Kursk region, where they seized hundreds of square miles in a surprise August offensive but have since lost nearly half that territory. U.S. intelligence agencies have reported that there are now at least 10,000 North Korean troops in the Kursk region, probably to buoy the Russian attempt to retake the final Ukrainian foothold that has irritated Russian President Vladimir Putin even as he tries to brush it off as insignificant.