What Ukraine doesn't understand about 2 Koreas

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23 that Kyiv had transferred two North Korean prisoners of war (POWs) to South Korea, Seoul's reaction was swift and unusually sharp.

President Lee Jae Myung accused Ukraine of breaching a nondisclosure agreement and the presidential office demanded an official apology. The foreign ministry summoned Ukraine's charge d'affaires. When Kyiv initially denied a confidentiality pact existed, Seoul called the denial a "falsehood" that "seriously undermines trust between the two governments." This was not a routine diplomatic complaint. It was a signal that something more fundamental had been misread.

The logic behind Kyiv's move is not hard to trace. Ukraine handed Seoul two strategically important POWs after months of quiet diplomacy — soldiers from among the estimated over 10,000 North Koreans deployed to fight for Russia. It has repeatedly asked South Korea for lethal weapons, most recently Cheongung-II air defense system in August, and been turned down each time.

Analysts widely read the public disclosure as a pressure tactic: make the transfer impossible to deny, raise Seoul's profile as a party to the conflict and push it toward supplying arms. The calculation seems transactional.

But Seoul did not see a generous gesture requiring reciprocity. It saw a partner unilaterally exposing a sensitive humanitarian operation for its own ends. The Lee administration is pursuing what it calls a "pacemaker" role on the Korean Peninsula, working to restart inter-Korean and U.S.-North Korea talks through a phased approach to denuclearization.

Public disclosure of the POW transfer risks provoking Pyongyang — which has already rejected every one of Lee's overtures — and endangers the families of the two soldiers still in the North. Zelenskyy’s U.N. announcement complicated each of these calculations simultaneously.

The deeper problem is one of comprehension. The inter-Korean relationship is not a foreign policy variable that outside actors can adjust by applying the right pressure. It is a relationship between a divided people — the same country until 1945, partitioned by external powers, torn apart by a war that has never formally ended. South Korea's constitution considers all North Koreans its citizens. More than 34,000 have defected to the South over the past seven decades.

The two POWs themselves, in a letter made public last December, called South Koreans "our parents and siblings" and said they wanted to come "into their embrace." Treating their transfer as a card to play in pursuit of air defense systems reflects a fundamental misread of what the Korean Peninsula is and of what it means for Seoul to receive them.

There is also a regional dimension that Kyiv appears to have undercalculated. North Korea's deepening military partnership with Russia is already hardening the divide. China's Xi Jinping also visited Pyongyang in June in what was seen as a move to reaffirm its influence on the Korean Peninsula.

Seoul is navigating a landscape in which every move toward one side risks pushing the other further away. Its refusal to supply lethal weapons to countries in active conflict is not timidity, but a long-standing principle tied to the calculation that an overtly hawkish posture would drive the North further into Moscow and Beijing's orbit, foreclosing what little space for dialogue remains.

None of this diminishes the gravity of Ukraine's war or the legitimacy of its need for arms. But the way Kyiv chose to press its case — turning a quiet, sensitive transfer into a public spectacle at the U.N. — achieved the opposite of what it intended. It damaged trust with a partner whose arsenal it wants access to and whose diplomatic position it failed to respect.

The two North Korean POWs are now in South Korea, where the law considers them citizens. South Koreans may call the North an enemy, but they will cheer for North Korean athletes at international sports games when they compete against other countries. That is the kind of relationship this is — too close and too complicated to be reduced to someone else's bargaining chip.