Ukraine-Russia latest: North Koreans used as battlefield ‘bait’ as Kyiv discusses help from Western troops – UK Times

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has discussed with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron the deployment of Western contingents to Ukraine.

“We … discussed the deployment of partner contingents and the training of our military,” Mr Zelensky said in his evening address.

Mr Macron has previously said he is open to the idea of sending French troops to Ukraine. He and other Western nations have since discussed the involvement of using their soldiers as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

It comes as the last written notes of a North Korean soldier revealed that Pyongyang’s troops are being used as bait by Russian troops to lure out Ukrainian drones on the battlefield.

The diary described how North Korea soldiers are ordered to stand within seven metres of Kyiv’s drones as covering soldiers try to shoot them down.

On one notebook page, a crude drawing shows a stickman soldier breaking cover to attract the attention of a drone, while his two comrades lie in wait to shoot it down.

“When the bait stands still, the drone will stop and it will be shot down,” the soldier wrote in scrawled handwriting, translated by The Wall Street Journal.