Ukraine-Russia war live: North Korean troops ‘already in Ukraine’ as Kyiv drafts 160,000 more into frontline

South Korea aims to send a team to Ukraine to monitor and analyse the deployment of North Korean troops by Russia, a presidential official said today.

The official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said Seoul and its allies estimated at least 11,000 North Korean soldiers had been moved to Russia with more than 3,000 of them now deployed close to the front lines in Ukraine.

Russia struck Ukraine’s capital for the 19th time this morning, leaving nine people injured. Several apartments set ablaze and a kindergarten was damaged, officials in Kyiv said today.

“Nineteen air attacks on Kyiv in October!” Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said. “Overnight, Russian drones again flew over the capital.”

Falling debris from a destroyed drone sparked a fire in a multi-storey apartment building in Kyiv’s western district of Solomianskyi and injured at least nine people, including an 11-year-old girl, mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.

“All of them were treated by medics on the spot,” Mr Klitschko said.

Around 19 people were evacuated from the building, said the city’s military administration, which also posted photographs of a building with blown-out windows and damaged facade that it described as a kindergarten in Solomianskyi.

Russian drones, missiles and bombs smashed into Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s biggest cities, in nighttime attacks, killing four people and wounding 15 in a continuing aerial onslaught, authorities said Tuesday.

Russia has bombarded civilian areas of Ukraine almost daily since its full-scale invasion of its neighbor almost three years ago, causing thousands of casualties. The Russian army is also pushing hard against front-line defenses in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was expected to speak about that new threat at a meeting Tuesday in Reykjavik with the leaders of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

A Russian aerial attack struck Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, at around 3 a.m., hitting a house and killing four people, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said. Nearly 20 houses were damaged in the attack, he said.

Several hours earlier, Russia dropped a glide bomb on the landmark Derzhprom building in Kharkiv city center, injuring seven people, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

Derzhprom, also known as the Palace of Industry, is included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List as an example of modernist architecture.

Terekhov said that Russia has concentrated attacks on Kharkiv in recent days. He urged people not to ignore air raid warnings.

Authorities in Kyiv said debris from intercepted Russian drones fell on two city districts, injuring six people.

Ukrainian air defence units destroyed 33 of the 62 drones that Russia launched overnight, Ukraine’s air forces said today.

Another 25 of the drones were unaccounted for, with some likely to had been intercepted by Ukraine’s electronic warfare measures, the air force said.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the remaining four drones.

Russia’s air defence units destroyed 23 Ukrainian drones overnight over several western Russian regions, the Russian defence ministry said.

Of these, seven Ukrainian drones were destroyed over the Rostov region, five over the Kursk region, four over the Smolensk region and the rest over the Oryol, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, the ministry said

At least nine people were injured, including an 11-year-old girl, and several apartments were on fire after a Russian drone attack on Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said this morning.

Falling debris from a destroyed drone sparked a fire in a multi-storey apartment building in the Solomianskyi district in Kyiv’s west, mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

“So far, nine people have been injured,” Mr Klitschko said. “All of them were treated by medics on the spot.”

The military administration of Kyiv posted a photo of flames bursting out of a flat in an apartment building. It also said that another fire broke out in a multi-storey administrative building in the Solomianskyi district.

Reuters witnesses heard a series of explosions in Kyiv in what sounded like air defence units in operation.

Kyiv, its surrounding region and nearly the whole eastern half of Ukraine were under air raid alerts from around 1.30am GMT.

Around 200 defectors from North Korea are keen to join Ukraine’s fight against Russia, a new report said.

“We are all military veterans who understand North Korea’s military culture and psychological state better than anyone else,” said a 69-year-old Ahn Chan-il told the South China Morning Post. Several members of the group of defectors all have several years of military experience.

This comes as the Pentagon estimated 10,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to eastern Russia for training, up from an estimate of 3,000 troops last week.

The US has confirmed some North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk region, a Russian border area where Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion in August and hold hundreds of square kilometres of territory.

South Korean officials have said some of the North Korean troops may have been moved to the frontline and expressed worry about what Russia may be providing to Pyongyang in return.

The Pentagon has said that North Korea dispatched 10,000 troops to Russia, with some of them believed to be heading to the Kursk border to join Vladimir Putin’s forces in their invasion of Ukraine amid the biggest conflict Europe has seen since the Second World War.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said some North Korean soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine and were believed to be heading for the Kursk border region. The Russian forces are facing difficulty in pushing back Ukraine’s cross-border incursion launched on 6 August.

This came within hours of Nato secretary general Mark Rutte confirming recent Ukrainian intelligence reports of the presence of North Korean military units deployed to Kursk near the Ukrainian border.

The notorious Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has promised to take revenge for a drone attack that caused a fire at a military training academy in his south Russian region.

Ukraine has frequently struck Russia with drones in the course of the war, but Tuesday’s attack appeared to be the first against Chechnya.

Kadyrov told reporters in a video published by the Russian state news agency RIA: “They’ve bitten us - we will destroy them. In the very near future we’ll show them the kind of vengeance they’ve never even dreamt of.”

Earlier, Kadyrov posted on Telegram that the drone strike had set fire to the roof of what he said was an empty building at the “special forces university” in the city of Gudermes. There were no casualties, he said.