“In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly address yesterday, calling the losses “significant.”

At the same time on Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces reported 179 separate clashes along the tense line of contact, facing down attacks around the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the city of Pokrovsk in the country's Donbas region. They estimated as many as 1,730 Russian personnel were killed or captured in the assaults.

Russian forces suffered 38,000 casualties in Kyiv's incursion into the Kursk region, according to Ukraine's commander-in-chief. Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Wednesday that Russian forces had also lost over 1,000 pieces of equipment and that Ukraine had taken hundreds of Russian troops captive.

The Ukrainian military said it had carried out a high-precision strike on Thursday on a Russian command post in Maryino, in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces hold chunks of territory after a major incursion.

US, Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence estimates indicate that the number of North Korean soldiers in Russia are between 11,000 to 12,000, some of whom have already engaged in combat operations

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian and North Korean forces have suffered heavy losses in fighting in Russia's southern Kursk region.