• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine has captured two North Korean soldiers.
• Zelenskyy said the two soldiers were wounded and had been taken to Kyiv.
• South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) has reportedly confirmed their capture.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine has captured two wounded North Korean soldiers.

In a statement posted on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy said the soldiers had been captured in Russia's Kursk region and had been taken to Kyiv, where they were now "communicating with the Security Service of Ukraine." He added that they were receiving the "necessary medical assistance."

Zelenskyy also shared images of two injured men, but he did not provide evidence that they were North Korean.

"This was not an easy task: Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea's involvement in the war against Ukraine," Zelenskyy said, adding that he had instructed Ukraine's security service to allow journalists access to the captured soldiers.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) has reportedly confirmed their capture.

The NIS told AFP that it had "confirmed that the Ukrainian military captured two North Korean soldiers on January 9 in the Kursk battlefield in Russia".

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has also shared some details from their questioning of the pair.

The SBU said the North Korean soldiers did not speak Ukrainian, English, or Russian, "so communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean," with help from the NIS.

The SBU said that one soldier told interrogators that he believed he had been sent for training, not to fight in the war against Ukraine.

It added that one of the soldiers was found with a Russian military ID card "issued in the name of another person," while the other had no documentation with him.

The soldier with the ID card stated that he was born in 2005 and that he had been serving as a rifleman in the North Korean military since 2021.

The other was born in 1999 and had been a scout sniper in the North Korean army since 2016, the SBU said, citing "preliminary information."

Pyongyang reportedly began sending troops to Russia in October.

White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said last month that Russia was using North Korean troops to carry out "human wave" assaults on Ukrainian positions, resulting in heavy casualties.

"It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders are treating these troops as expendable and ordering them on hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses," Kirby said. "These North Korean soldiers appear to be highly indoctrinated, pushing attacks even when it is clear that those attacks are futile."

Zelenskyy said last month that preliminary estimates suggested that more than 3,000 of Pyongyang's soldiers had been killed or wounded in Kursk.

He previously said that Russian forces had been trying "to literally burn the faces of North Korean soldiers killed in battle" in an effort to "conceal" their losses.

In December, a North Korean soldier believed to be the first to be captured by Ukrainian forces died from his injuries, South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) said, per Yonhap news agency.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

• The President of Mexico has suggested renaming parts of the US to "América Mexicana."
• Claudia Sheinbaum's sarcastic remark followed Trump's idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico as "the Gulf of America."
• Sheinbaum added that she believed she would have a good relationship with Trump.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has responded to President-elect Donald Trump's proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico as "the Gulf of America," suggesting that parts of North America should be renamed "América Mexicana."

During a press briefing on Wednesday, Sheinbaum pointed to a colonial-era 17th-century map showing parts of US territory that were once part of Mexico.

"Why don't we call it América Mexicana? That sounds nice, no?" she said.

Her remarks came after Trump, speaking at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday, said he planned to rename the Gulf.

"We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America," he said. "What a beautiful name — and it's appropriate."

Following the conference, United States Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X: "I'll be introducing legislation ASAP to officially change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to its rightful name, the Gulf of America!"

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was willing to work with Trump on renaming the Gulf, but only if Trump worked with Democrats on "an actual plan to lower costs for Americans."

"That is what the American people want us to focus on first, not on renaming bodies of water," Schumer said.

In the press briefing, Sheinbaum also hit back at Trump's claim that Mexico was "run by cartels," saying the "people are in charge" of the nation.

The president added that Trump had "his own way of communicating" but that she believed she would still have a good relationship with him.

• A plane carrying 181 people crashed at an airport in South Korea in late December, killing 179.
• Photos and videos show the aircraft overrunning a runway before being engulfed in flames.
• It will likely take months or years to uncover why the plane crashed.

A commercial aircraft crashed at a South Korean airport last month, killing 179 people.

Flight 7C2216, operated by the Korean budget airline Jeju Air, was carrying 181 passengers and crew when it tried to land at Muan International Airport at 9:03 a.m. local time but overran the runway.

A video broadcast by MBC News, a South Korean news network, showed the plane speeding down the runway, with smoke coming from its belly, before it crashed into what appeared to be a barrier and burst into flames.

The flight was traveling from Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok.

The aircraft was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 that Ryanair, a budget Irish airline, operated before it was delivered to Jeju Air in 2017, according to the Planespotters.net flight tracking website. It was not a Max variant, which has been embroiled in quality and production problems.

Video footage shows the aircraft landed without its landing gear deployed.

Airline News editor and aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told Business Insider that a bird strike could have caused a mechanical issue on the plane.

"It's possible that the bird strike prevented the standard landing gear operation," he said. "It's possible, however, the pilots could crank the landing gear down manually."

"But if they had multiple failures related to the engines, then they probably didn't have time to do it, and therefore they simply made a belly-up landing on the runway because they had no options," Thomas added.

Jeju Air CEO Kim Yi-bae told reporters on December 31 that the aircraft's pre-flight inspection found "no issues" and "nothing abnormal was noted with the landing gear," the BBC reported.

South Korea's transport ministry said that it planned to conduct a safety inspection of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft in the country, per Yonhap News.

The Boeing 737-800 is a popular aircraft that is used widely around the world.

Cirium data sent to BI found about 4,400 737-800s are used by nearly 200 airlines, representing 15% of the 28,000 passenger planes in service globally.

In a statement to BI, Boeing gave its condolences to families who lost loved ones and said it was in contact with and "ready to support" Jeju Air.

Spokespeople for Jeju Air did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement posted online, Jeju Air said it was "bowing" its head in apology and would investigate the crash.

A total of 179 people died. Two of the plane's six crew members survived and were conscious, according to local health officials. They were rescued from the tail section of the jet.

It was the first fatal crash involving a Jeju plane since the airline was founded in 2005. The last major aviation accident involving a South Korean airline was in 1997 when a Korean Air jet crashed in Guam, killing 228 people.

Reports of birds striking the aircraft

In a televised briefing, Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan fire station, said that workers were investigating what caused the crash, including whether birds struck the aircraft.

"It appears that the aircraft wasn't configured for a normal landing — the landing gear wasn't down, and it looks like the wing flaps weren't extended either," Keith Tonkin, the managing director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consulting company in Australia, told BI.

The plane was almost completely destroyed, with the tail assembly the most intact part of the wreckage. After landing, the plane hit a wall, which Thomas said was within international standards, but the plane landed fast and far down the runway.

"The airport complied with international standards," he said. "The landing was anything but international standard."

Officials said that air traffic controllers warned about bird strike risks minutes before the incident, and a surviving crew member mentioned a bird strike after being rescued, The Guardian reported.

Thomas told BI that the pilots reported "mayday" shortly after air traffic controllers issued a bird strike warning. The pilots were then given permission to land on the opposite side of the runway.

Thomas said flight tracking was lost at about 900 feet, suggesting a possible electrical failure.

"I think that could well be one of the pivotal factors in this investigation as to why did it fail," he said. "What does that tell us about what was going on in the cockpit?"

South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported that Muan International Airport has the highest rate of bird strike incidents among 14 airports nationwide.

Black boxes stopped recording before the crash

The Independent reported that transport ministry officials said they recovered the aircraft's two black boxes: the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

These would normally provide investigators with information that could help string together events before and during a crash.

However, Yonhap reported that officials said one of the black boxes, the flight data recorder, was partially damaged. The cockpit voice recorder remained intact.

South Korean authorities said on Saturday that an analysis by the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the black boxes holding the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped recording around four minutes before the crash, per Yonhap news agency.

The crash occurred at 9.03 a.m., and the data stopped recording at 8.59 am., the report said.

South Korea's transport ministry said plans were "in place to investigate the cause of the data loss during the ongoing accident investigation," AFP reported.

Crashes typically have more than one cause — known as the "Swiss Cheese Model" in aviation, a string of smaller errors often leads to an accident, not just one.

"The biggest risk is speculation because it obscures the actual causes of a near-miss, incident, or accident," Simon Bennett, an aviation safety expert at the University of Leicester in the UK, told BI.

"I appreciate that the relatives of the dead and injured will want answers. Understandably, they will want closure," he said. "However, rushing the investigation would do a huge disservice to the aviation community and airlines' customers."