Home › Politics › What Kyiv and Vilnius were dealing with in mid-January
What Kyiv and Vilnius were dealing with in mid-January
Summary
A look back at two regional developments reported in the days before 14 January 2025: captured North Korean soldiers and a Lithuanian move to protect a power link.
What was happening on the edges of the war in Ukraine as of 14 January 2025? Two developments reported in the preceding days gave a sense of how widely the conflict reached.
Two North Korean prisoners
On 11 January 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had captured two North Korean soldiers in Kursk Oblast, Russia. They were in healthy condition. It was the first time such captives had been taken since North Korea entered the war. The two earlier North Korean prisoners of war had died of their injuries shortly after being captured.
North Korea's support for Russia had a longer record. As later described, Pyongyang backed Moscow from 2017, when it recognised the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. In July 2022 it recognised the Russia-backed, self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, and Ukraine responded by severing diplomatic ties with North Korea.
Guarding a power link in Lithuania
On 8 January 2025, Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas deployed police to secure the country's electricity link with Poland. The move responded to reported attempts to disrupt the planned decoupling of the Baltic states' power systems from the grid shared with Belarus and Russia.
The two reports came from different fronts: a battlefield capture in Russia's Kursk region and a security measure around energy infrastructure in the Baltics. Both were part of the wider regional picture around Russia's war against Ukraine in the middle of January 2025.
