2 N. Korean POWs in Ukraine express desire to defect to S. Korea in letter: activist

Two North Korean soldiers who were captured in Ukraine while fighting for Russia have written a letter expressing their desire to defect to South Korea, an activist in Seoul said Friday. Jang Se-yul, head of a North Korean defectors' group in the South, said the two North Korean captives in their 20s wrote such a letter in October when they met a South Korean documentary producer at a prisoner-of-war camp near Kyiv. The letter was delivered to the group via the producer earlier this month. "We've made up our mind to go to South Korea, thinking of those in South Korea as our parents and brothers," the letter read. In the letter, the captives expressed their appreciation for those who said the current situation facing them is "not a tragedy but the beginning of a new life." "A new dream and aspiration have begun springing up on the back of support from people in the Republic of Korea," it said. The North Korean POWs were under the media spotlight when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote online in January that they had been captured by Ukrainian forces in Russia's western Kursk reg