North Korea’s deployment of troops to the battlefields of the Ukraine war has brought major political and material benefits for Pyongyang, enabling its soldiers to gain valuable combat experience while further boosting ties with Russia.

But inside the DPRK, Kim Jong Un’s orthodox move has also posed a political problem: how to justify the dispatch of soldiers to fight and die on foreign soil.

After months of silence on the issue, North Korean propagandists have gone into overdrive in recent weeks to construct a narrative around the troop deployment and the deaths of hundreds in Russia’s Kursk region, celebrating their