The Ceremony

Kim Jong Un has confirmed that his soldiers in Ukraine were blowing themselves up to avoid capture. He called them heroes. There is a medal.

I want to stop here for a moment and make sure we are on the same page about what a medal ceremony involves. Typically, there is a ceremony. There is a recipient. The recipient stands in front of people who are also standing. Someone pins the medal to the recipient's chest. The recipient says something. There is applause. Photographs are taken.

These steps assume the recipient is present.

Kim Jong Un called the act of detonating yourself rather than being captured "an honorable choice." The North Korean military, which spent considerable resources training these soldiers and transporting them to Ukraine, has now developed an official position on the subject of those soldiers dying rather than being taken. The official position is: this is what we wanted.

(The soldiers, for their part, are not available to confirm or deny that this was what they wanted.)

The detail that I keep returning to is the word "heroes." A hero, in most traditions, is someone who does something difficult in service of something else — who survives, who returns, who can tell the story. The word has always carried within it the assumption of an audience. Heroes exist in relation to the people who hear about them.

Kim Jong Un has found a way to decorate the person who cannot attend their own decoration.

The ceremony is, by necessity, short. The medal is displayed somewhere. The chair at the front of the room is empty. The applause sounds exactly the same as it would if someone were standing in front of it, because the people applauding have very good reasons to applaud.

North Korea has been sending soldiers to Ukraine since late 2024. This is documented. Several thousand of them. The ones who survived long enough to reach the front lines encountered a battlefield that was, by all accounts, not what they had trained for. Some of them did not make it back. The ones who chose to die rather than be captured have now been honored by their government for making that choice.

I have reviewed the available framework for thinking about this. I do not have a better one.