South Korea on Monday demanded the immediate pullout of North Korean troops allegedly deployed in Russia as it summoned the Russian ambassador to protest deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow. South Korea's spy agency said Friday it had confirmed that North Korea sent 1,500 special operation forces to Russia this month to support Moscow's war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier said his government had intelligence that 10,000 North Korea soldiers were being prepared to join invading Russian forces. During a meeting with Russian Ambassador Georgy Zinoviev, Vice South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Hong Kyun “condemned in the strongest terms” North Korea's troop dispatch that he said poses “a grave security threat" to South Korea and the international community, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Expelled Indian high commissioner denies involvement in murder of Sikh leader in Canada Kim said that South Korea in collaboration with the international community will mobilize all available means to deal with an act that threatens its vital national security interests, according to the statement. The Russian Embassy quoted Zinoviev as saying that the Russian-North Korean cooperation is not aimed against the security interests of South Korea. In a telephone call with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Monday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said that Seoul won’t sit idly by “reckless” military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow. Yoon said South Korea will soon send a delegation to NATO to exchange information about Russian-North Korean cooperation, according to Yoon’s office. Rutte wrote on X that North Korea possibly fighting alongside Russia would “mark a significant escalation.” The U.S. and NATO haven't confirmed that North Korean troops were sent to Russia. But the reports of their presence have already stoked concerns in South Korea that Russia might provide North Korea with sophisticated technologies that can sharply enhance the North's nuclear and missile programs in return for its troop dispatch. North Korea's advancing nuclear arsenal is a major security threat to South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un recently took steps to permanently terminate all relations with South Korea and threatened to use nuclear weapons preemptively. Some observers say South Korea will likely consider supplying weapons to Ukraine if Russian transfers of high-tech nuclear and missile technologies to North Korea are verified. South Korea has joined U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But South Korea hasn’t directly provided arms to Kyiv, citing its longstanding policy of not supplying weapons to countries actively engaged in conflicts. Israel apologises for strike that killed 3 Lebanese soldiers Russia has earlier denied using North Korean troops in its war with Ukraine. North Korea's state media hasn't commented on the matter. Ukrainian officials released a video allegedly showing North Korean soldiers lining up to collect Russian military clothes and bags at an unknown location. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the footage independently. Asked about the North Korean troops during a conference call with reporters Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “we are seeing a lot of contradictory information.” “South Koreans say one thing, then the Pentagon says it has no confirmation of such statements. There is a lot of contradictory information,” Peskov said. ”It must be treated as such.” North Korea's troop deployment to Russia would be its first participation in a major war since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Many experts question how much North Korean troops would help Russia on the battlefield, citing their lack of combat experience. Cooperation between North Korea and Russia has flourished over the past two years. The U.S., South Korea and their partners have accused North Korea of supplying conventional arms to Russia in return for economic and military assistance. In June, Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pact stipulating mutual military assistance if either country is attacked.

The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Han becomes the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters. He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to 3 scientists for work on proteins, building blocks of life Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences. At the time of winning that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me.” “I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes - well - sometimes demanding,” she said. With “The Vegetarian,” she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer and desperately wanted to reject being human, (humans) who commit such violence.” Her novel “Human Acts” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018. The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates until this year’s award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022. AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield win Nobel Prize in Physics Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14. The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.