KOREA CHANGE

North Korean Soldier Makes Unusual Defection to the South

Most flee through North Korea’s leaky border with China.

A North Korean soldier has pulled off a highly unusual defection to South Korea across the land mine-riddled Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The South Korean military said in a statement that he has been taken into custody, Reuters reported. There have been around 34,000 defections since the end of the Korean War in 1953, but few have crossed the lethal stretch of land directly. The soldier becomes the first person to do it in more than a year, when a staff sergeant escaped across the border in August 2024. Most people fleeing the isolationist dictatorship do so through the border with China, the Associated Press reports. Defectors trying to flee North Korea face sniper towers, landmines, and barbed wire. When a soldier tried to make a break for it in 2017, North Korean sentries fired more than three dozen bullets at them, forcing South Korean border guards to drag the injured soldier to their side.