SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-un confirmed this week that the ancient military tradition of “death before dishonor” — committing suicide rather than being taken captive — remains an honored practice among his North Korean soldiers.
The North Korean leader, speaking at the opening of a memorial and museum dedicated to the troops he sent to fight alongside Russians in the war against Ukraine, praised the soldiers who took their own lives.
“They died a heroic death,” he said, according to state media monitored in Seoul.
Mr. Kim was joined by Russian Defence Minister Andrey Belousov and Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin at the dedication. North Korea is the only nation that has officially sent troops to assist Russia in its war. However, Kyiv reports that mercenaries from Cuba, China and Africa are also fighting for the Russians.
Mr. Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense treaty in Pyongyang in June 2024. In August 2024, Ukrainian forces counterattacked into Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
As many as 13,000 North Korean troops joined Russian forces attacking Kyiv’s lodgment. Ukrainian forces engaged offered grudging praise, noting that the North Koreans were more combat-effective than the Russians. By March 2025, Ukrainian forces had retreated across their frontier.
“Self-blasting” tactics are “the height of the loyalty of our army,” Mr. Kim said.
The reference to “self-blasting” was the first official acknowledgment that North Koreans facing capture kill themselves.
The gruesome military tradition, notable in modern times in the Imperial Japanese Army and the most hardcore of Islamic terrorists, speaks to the force of indoctrination in communist North Korea.
But it is not infallible.
A handful of North Korean operatives, post-capture, have been turned by acts of kindness or by the obvious falsehoods of state propaganda, exposing weaknesses at the heart of the Kim regime.
On the battlefields of Russia and Ukraine, the North Koreans’ “self-blasting” has been captured on camera by Ukrainian drones. A wounded man pulls the pin on a grenade and places it inside his body armor. The ensuing detonation ensures the Ukrainians will not take a prisoner.
Though many cultures and armies celebrate “last stand” actions, for Americans, the Alamo and Little Bighorn are notable examples. But they are rare. Almost every armed force grants its soldiers the right to surrender when resistance becomes impossible.
Before North Korean activities in Ukraine, only one military in the modern era adopted the practice force-wide.
Allied troops fighting in the Pacific in World War II were stunned by the suicidal “banzai” charges of the Imperial Japanese Army and their refusal to be taken alive.
Paul de Vries, author of “Remembering Santayana: The lessons unlearnt from the war against Japan” (2017), says the IJA was inspired by deep culture.
“Japanese soldiers were highly invested in their cause, and were influenced by the suicide culture of the samurai,” he said. “They would commit suicide out of duty, shame and obligation.”
Ironically, North Korea’s founding father forged his reputation as a diehard opponent of Japan.
Before being chosen by Stalin to head the nascent North Korean state in 1948, Nationalist-communist Kim Il Sung — Kim Jong-un’s grandfather — led guerrillas in a brutal conflict that raged across the rugged landscapes of Manchuria in the 1930s.
Yet, Korean dynastic annals offer no tradition of fighting to the death. “I cannot remember this in our traditional history,” said Shin Kyoung-soo, a retired South Korean general.
And communism is no death cult: Millions of Red Army troops surrendered to invading Germans in World War II.
Mr. De Vries speculated that Mr. Kim may have learned from his enemies.
“Samurai culture flowed through Japan to the Imperial era and — to some extent — through to the [Korean] peninsula,” he said.
Imperial Japan colonized Korea from 1910-1945.
Mr. Kim disagreed, though he admitted that East Asia’s Confucian culture — laden with obligations to seniors and wider groups — may play a role.
A former U.S. Army interrogator of enemy personnel put the onus on the regime indoctrination.
All North Koreas are inculcated in “10 Principles of Monolithic Ideology,” said Bob Collins. That ideology, with its intense focus on loyalty and duty to the Kims, is further reinforced during military service.
“Every North Korean citizen has to go through TPMI: It teaches that what Kims say, you do,” said Mr. Collins, who is the author of a 2025 study of North Korea’s special forces, “The Reconnaissance General Bureau: The Kim Regime’s ‘Precious Treasured Sword.”
When North Korean males undertake their decade-long military service, indoctrination continues in battalions.
“These guys are 19 or 20 years old,” Mr. Collins said. “To be captured is to be disloyal to the Kims.”
He agrees with Mr. De Vries that fear is a motivator.
“If they are captured, there is the principle of ‘guilt by association,’” he said. “If news gets out, their families will suffer.”
Pre-Ukraine War, North Korean operatives had a tradition of killing themselves to evade capture. Even so, holes have been punched through the ideological wall.
In 1968, a commando unit deployed to kill the South Korean president was virtually wiped out.
In 1983, a North Korean agent who blew up a visiting South Korean political delegation to Rangoon, Myanmar, was captured, refused to confess and was hanged.
In 1987, a North Korean operative who had blown up a South Korean passenger aircraft in the Middle East killed himself with a suicide pill when facing capture.
And in 1995, a North Korean submarine ran aground off South Korea. Of the crew of sailors and commandos, only one surrendered. The rest were killed by each other or in combat with South Korean troops.
Yet a handful of operatives from those missions turned. Their changes of heart followed decent treatment by their captors, and/or their realization that the propaganda that they had been fed was a lie.
After the 1968 raid, one commando, Kim Shin Jo, surrendered, was turned by South Korean intelligence, and became a Protestant pastor in South Korea.
After the 1983 Rangoon attack, the surviving North Korean operative, Kang Min Chol — seriously wounded — adopted Christianity, later dying in a Burmese prison.
After the 1987 terrorist bombing, one spy — Kim Hyon-hui (code-name: “Mayumi”) — was captured. Astonished by South Korean prosperity, which ran contrary to her indoctrination, she married her interrogator and became an anti-Pyongyang activist.
And after the 1995 submarine incursion, one commando was captured and turned.
Most recently, two North Koreans have been taken by Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Both were wounded, so they were unable to kill themselves.
Interviewed by South Korean media, both said they wished to defect to Seoul.
“It only takes a kind word to destroy two decades of brainwashing,” Chun In-bum, a retired general who commanded Seoul’s special forces, said. “All it took was a smile, a hot tea and these guys, who were ready to kill themselves, gave in. North Korea is really, really brittle.”
But Mr. Collins, citing a female spy captured in the 1970s, is wary of drawing wider pictures.
“My intelligence and interrogation unit had a small prison with 10 cells, and this one lady in there would bite her finger and write on the cell wall, in her own blood, how loyal she was to Kim Il Sung,” he recalled. “She never turned. She spent the rest of her life in prison.”
