Facing exhaustion and North Korean troops, Ukraine's soldiers say the war needs to end
CBC News spoke to soldiers near the front line where they are trying to hold territory in Kursk region
As soldiers fighting for Ukraine try to hold onto the hundreds of square kilometres they seized in Russia's Kursk region in August, some describe facing relentless waves of determined North Korean troops, Russian units with improved tactics, and Ukraine's own struggles with exhaustion and sinking morale.
"I honestly don't think we're going to be able to hold it for much longer," said Chapi, a foreign fighter who spoke to CBC in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine, about 15 km from the Russian border.
"What I am hoping for is that they just freeze the lines for six months. Give the politicians time to try and negotiate."
Chapi, like other soldiers CBC News spoke with, is only being identified by his call sign in accordance with Ukrainian military rules.
He and other members of his assault unit describe a worsening situation along the Kursk front, where there are not enough troops or weapons to counter a Russian military bolstered by thousands of skilled North Korean soldiers.
When Ukraine seized the territory in a surprise incursion in August 2024, it invigorated the military and the Ukrainian public who were weary after seeing Russia continue to claw away at land in the country's southeast.
But over recent months, Ukraine has been losing the territory it took.
Chapi, who has been fighting in Ukraine since 2022, says with the military short on troops, and with mobilized men who lack experience desperately trying to fill gaps on the frontline, peace talks can't come soon enough.
Kursk could be bargaining chip
The last time Chapi describes being this scared was during the fight for Bakhmut which lasted nearly a year, as Russia sent wave after wave of Wagner mercenary fighters and convicts into battle.
He says the difference this time is that the North Koreans are much better trained, and drone warfare has advanced so rapidly that the aerial threat is near constant.
Ukrainian officials say they took the area in Kursk to create a buffer zone, but now with U.S. President Donald Trump pushing to end the war, there is speculation that Kursk is also a bargaining chip that can be used in any future negotiations.
But only if Ukraine holds on to it.
Chapi says many of the soldiers on the front line now are not of the same calibre as before. Instead of volunteering to fight, they were forced to through conscription.
"A lot of those guys don't want to be there. They just want to survive the war."
'We are all tired,' says soldier
Last April, Ukraine's government lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25. But U.S. officials have been urging Ukraine to reduce it even further, which so far the government has resisted, arguing that Ukraine's main issue is lack of weaponry not troops.
A 26-year-old soldier, who goes by the call sign Google and fights alongside Chapi, had just got married and was working as a sales manager when he was drafted nine months ago.
"I want to go back to civilian life quickly," he told CBC News.
"We are all tired. We want peace."
In December, Ukraine's president said that more than 42,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and hundreds of thousands injured since the start of the full-scale invasion.
While the government maintains that Ukraine's military is made of 800,000, the General Prosecutor's Office has said that more than 100,000 soldiers have been charged under the country's desertion laws since the start of the war in February 2022.
Ukrainian media have reported that an investigation has been launched into the 155th Mechanized Brigade over accusations that 1,700 of the men left even before the unit entered battle.
Inadequate training, soldier reports
With its ranks depleted, at the end of last year Ukraine granted an amnesty which would allow soldiers who went AWOL to escape punishment if they return to their units.
Voodoo, another foreign volunteer who works as a medic and has been based in Kursk, said scattered across the front, there are "good brigades, mediocre brigades, and terrible brigades."
He said while Ukraine is trying to provide new soldiers with a basic level of training, he believes it's often inadequate and amounts to a "box-ticking" exercise.
He described being present at a recent course where the instructor started each lesson telling troops to just pretend that there weren't any drones in the skies, which he said is completely unrealistic.
"Sure, I can pretend I'm fighting on the moon, or riding a unicorn, if you like. But that's not the war we're fighting," he said.
"So why bother even doing the training?"
North Korean reinforcements
Experts believe the number of Russian military deaths is significantly greater than Ukraine's. Independent Russian journalists who have been tracking the dead and wounded, estimate the number of dead to be at about 150,000.
But Russia has a much larger population, and is now using imported troops from North Korea.
The soldiers fighting for Ukraine said that they are struck by how small the North Koreans they have seen on the battlefield are compared to the Russians, but say they are clearly skilled and unwavering. He said their movements are more aggressive and their shooting more precise.
Chapi says they use more men to launch assaults, and said he witnessed one group charge forward as a commander screamed at them from behind.
"I don't know what he was screaming, but I can tell you it wasn't like, 'Okay, now come back,'" he said.
"He was like sending them, sending them the whole time. And this was after the North Koreans took casualties."
Unlike the Russians, the soldier Google said the North Koreans retrieve all of their dead. There are some reports that as many as 1,000 of them have already been killed in Kursk.
While Ukraine has captured two men who are now in custody in Kyiv, Google says the North Koreans he has come across refuse to become prisoners of war.
He said he has personally witnessed some choosing to blow themselves up with grenades instead of being captured.
Dreams of going home
Google, who spoke to CBC during a three-day break, dreams of starting a family and leaving the front line for good, but he is waiting to hear more of what Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskky have to say.
When asked what kind of peace agreement he would support, he is unsure but says it may require peacekeepers from other countries patrolling the border and enforcing a ceasefire.
If that is part of a hypothetical deal, Zelenskyy has said that 200,000 troops at minimum would be needed.
Yaryi, 25, another soldier from the same assault squad who was previously an MMA fighter before being mobilized, said there is only one way a peace agreement can work: if Russia withdraws from the territory it occupies, including Crimea which it illegally annexed in 2014.
"If they get 20 per cent of our territory, it's not peace," he said. "They would just attack again in three or four years."
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