Photo : YONHAP News
The Ukrainian presidential office said Thursday that the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea was carried out through direct talks with Seoul, describing the matter as “highly sensitive.”
It said the two men are ethnic Koreans and that South Korea considers them its citizens, while denying reports that Russia had repeatedly requested their transfer and saying Moscow had shown no interest in them.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disclosed the previous day in his U.N. General Assembly speech in New York that Ukraine had recently sent the two POWs to South Korea, while Seoul effectively confirmed their transfer without directly denying it.
Asked whether Ukraine and South Korea had agreed to keep the transfer confidential, the Ukrainian presidential office said it would have been unusual for an open country to secretly send captured prisoners somewhere, adding that although the full circumstances were lengthy and detailed, Ukraine had only disclosed the fact that the two men had been sent to South Korea.
President Lee Jae Myung criticized Zelenskyy for publicly disclosing the transfer, saying on social media that he did not know the circumstances behind the decision but found it regrettable that Zelenskyy had violated an agreement to keep the matter confidential.
The two North Korean soldiers were reportedly captured by Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region in January last year, and South Korea has said it would accept them as South Korean citizens under the Constitution after they expressed their intention to defect.