Seoul caught off guard by Zelensky's announcement of North Korean POW transfer
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly revealed on Monday (local time) in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York that Ukraine had recently sent two North Korean soldiers captured by its military to South Korea. The transfer had reportedly been carried out under a confidential agreement with the Ukrainian side, which Zelensky's public announcement broke.
The transferred POWs are identified as Ri, 26, and Baek, 21, who qualify as South Korean citizens under the constitution. Rep. Yu Yong-won of the People Power Party, who has been involved in the issue of North Korean POWs, said at a press conference at the National Assembly on Tuesday that the two men had entered South Korea via a third country a few days earlier.
After weighing the diplomatic fallout for inter-Korean and South Korea-Russia relations as well as the safety of the POWs and their families, the South Korean government had reached an agreement with Ukraine, after dozens of rounds of back-channel negotiations, to transfer the POWs confidentially. The government, particularly the presidential office and the foreign ministry, has maintained that it cannot confirm the details of the POWs' handling, the timing and route, or the content of the bilateral consultations, while not denying Zelensky's remarks.
President Lee Jae Myung said in a post on X on Tuesday that "the repatriation of North Korean POWs to the South is an extremely sensitive issue with major implications for diplomacy, security, and the situation on the Korean Peninsula," adding that "keeping it confidential was justified in every respect, and that is what we agreed to." He went on: "The Ukrainian side broke the confidentiality agreement and made it public. I don't know what circumstances led to it, but it is deeply regrettable."
In response to related inquiries, the Ukrainian presidential office said, "We only announced the fact that we sent them to the Republic of Korea," adding, "It would have been strange to send the POWs in secret."
