Lee says Seoul will answer if Ukraine will not apologise over the two POWs

President Lee Jae Myung said on Friday that South Korea will take additional measures if Ukraine does not offer a formal apology for disclosing the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war. He posted the warning on X. The disclosure was President Volodymyr Zelensky's, made to the UN General Assembly last week. Seoul says the transfer was supposed to stay secret. Kyiv says there was no such agreement.

Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, had tried to close the gap on Thursday. He called the episode a diplomatic misunderstanding and said Kyiv was working to resolve it. Lee rejected the word. He said the matter concerned the dignity of the Korean people and of the nation, and that Ukraine, asked to acknowledge an agreement and apologise, had instead spoken of an imminent military clash between North and South. He accused Kyiv of trying to bring war onto the Korean peninsula. Yonhap carried the warning as a pledge of additional measures if the apology does not come.

Lee's office has given its version of who asked for silence. It says Ukraine requested that the move be kept quiet, partly to protect the families of the two North Koreans, and partly because Kyiv did not want the criticism that would follow from trading away a chance to swap the soldiers for Ukrainian prisoners in Russian hands. That account, if it holds, means both capitals had a reason to say nothing, and only one of them spoke. Zelensky's sentence at the General Assembly turned a bilateral transfer into a public exhibit, useful in a speech about foreign fighters on the Russian side, costly in a relationship Seoul had kept inside limits.

Those limits are the policy fact underneath the row. South Korea has been publicly sympathetic to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion and has not sent lethal weapons to a country at war, a rule Seoul applies generally, not only to this conflict. The prisoner transfer was a step past statements. Two North Korean soldiers, captured in Ukraine, moved to the South. For Seoul that is a consular and intelligence event involving its principal enemy's troops. For Kyiv it is evidence, on a UN stage, that Pyongyang's deployment was real enough to produce prisoners. Publishing it without the silence Seoul says was promised is what Lee is treating as an injury, not as a misunderstanding.

What "additional measures" means is not in the post. Seoul can slow diplomatic contact, revisit non-lethal aid, or say less in forums where Ukraine wants Asian votes. It cannot, under its own stated policy, add weapons to the list of things it might withhold, because weapons were not on offer. The leverage is smaller than the tone of the warning. It is still leverage Ukraine has used. Kyiv has spent two years asking partners for shells, air defence and political cover. A public fight with a major Asian economy, over two prisoners and a secrecy claim, spends political cover in a capital that was already at the edge of what it would give.

The families argument cuts both ways. If Ukraine asked for secrecy to protect relatives in the North, Zelensky's disclosure put those relatives in the speech. If Seoul is wrong and no secrecy deal existed, then Lee's demand for an apology is a demand that Kyiv accept Seoul's version of a conversation. Sybiha's "misunderstanding" was an offer to blur that difference. Lee declined it in public, on the same platform where the dispute is now being conducted.

Neither side has published the text of an agreement, a note, or a date on which silence was promised. Until one of them does, the record is Zelensky's sentence at the General Assembly, Sybiha's attempt to rename the damage, and Lee's reply that an apology is the price of leaving the matter there. The two prisoners are in the South. The argument about who was allowed to say so is not finished.