The North Korean defector who’s been called a ‘hero of Ukraine’

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL—When Ukraine was scrambling this winter to understand how to respond to the threat of thousands of North Korean soldiers deployed to fight alongside Russia, it turned to someone steeped in Pyongyang’s ways: a North Korean defector.

Lee Seongmin, a 37-year-old human-rights worker who is an Ivy League graduate and fluent in English, has helped Ukrainian forces understand the motives driving Kim Jong Un’s young fighters, translating key documents and shaping antiregime leaflets meant to persuade North Korean soldiers to surrender. “It feels like I’m conversing with them," said Lee, who worked for a state agency before fleeing to South Korea, “like I’m a fellow soldier." In December, he was even among the first people outside Ukraine to see the trove of diaries, notepads and photos taken from slain North Korean soldiers’ bodies from the Russian front lines.

Ukraine, which has little in the way of Korean speakers or experts of the Kim regime, was unprepared for the arrival of roughly 12,000 North Korean troops on the battlefield. So when Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, first put Lee, his Seoul-based colleague, in touch with an American activist aiding Ukrainian soldiers last year, they welcomed it.

Lee’s firsthand experience with North Korean totalitarianism and his ability to understand subtle nuances in the soldiers’ writings that even a South Korean translator might miss would be invaluable. “I thought he would be perfectly positioned to help the world understand why North Koreans were being sent to their death in Ukraine," Gladstein said.