A total of 3,800 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded by Ukrainian forces in Russia's Kursk Oblast, President Zelensky said in an interview with American podcaster Lex Fridman on Jan. 5.

"In battles yesterday and today near a single village, Makhnovka, in Kursk region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address on Jan.

When the deadly Grenfell Tower blaze in 2017 led to revelations that high-rise public housing buildings across Britain were wrapped in flammable cladding, the government vowed the building contractors responsible would pay for their negligence.

At the same time on Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces reported 179 separate clashes along the tense line of contact, facing down attacks around the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the city of Pokrovsk in the country's Donbas region. They estimated as many as 1,730 Russian personnel were killed or captured in the assaults.

Ukrainian and Western assessments say that some 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August.

North Korea is “significantly benefiting” from its troops gaining battlefield experience fighting alongside Russian forces as it makes them more capable of waging war against rivals South Korea and Japan,