Seoul Memorial Honours Soviet-Era Korean Veterans as Victory Day Traditions Spread Beyond Russia's Borders

On 9 May 2026, a procession of Seoul residents carried framed portraits through the South Korean capital in an annual commemoration that most South Koreans have never witnessed. The Immortal Regiment — a tradition that began in Russia following the 2011-12 revival campaign and spread internationally after 2014 — has taken root in dozens of cities outside Russian jurisdiction. A TASS correspondent reported participants moving through Seoul on the day marked as Victory Day across the former Soviet space, carrying images of relatives who served in the Soviet armed forces during the Second World War.

The procession in Seoul points to a specific but underexplored chapter of twentieth-century history: the estimated 150,000 ethnic Koreans who lived in the Soviet Union on the eve of the German invasion, and the thousands who served in the Red Army, navy, and partisan detachments during the war. Many Korean families had been forcibly relocated to Central Asia during Stalin's collectivisation campaigns of the 1930s. Those who remained in the Far East after the peninsula's division following Japan's defeat in 1945 found themselves caught between Soviet and later North Korean statehood. Their children and grandchildren now form part of a diaspora whose commemorative traditions do not align neatly with the dominant narratives of either Koreas.

The Immortal Regiment movement has been among the most visible vectors for this particular memory work. Unlike official state ceremonies in Moscow, the procession is designed to be grass-roots — families carry their own ancestors' portraits rather than those selected by authorities. Since the 2015 seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe, the format has been replicated in cities across Europe, the Americas, and, increasingly, Asia. The Seoul event reflects this扩散, though its scale and the specific biographical details of those commemorated this year are not detailed in the TASS reporting.

For South Korean audiences, the procession sits uncomfortably alongside a national memory culture that centres the Korean War of 1950-53 and Japan's colonial occupation. The Second World War is remembered primarily through the lens of suffering under Japanese rule — a framework that does not readily accommodate Korean combatants in Soviet uniform. Yet the Soviet theatre was real: ethnic Koreans served as soldiers, officers, and medics on the Eastern Front, in the air war, and in the campaign against Japan in the final weeks of the conflict. Several received decorations for bravery; some did not return.

The geopolitical backdrop to the Seoul event adds a further layer of complexity. Russia and North Korea have deepened their strategic partnership since 2024, and Russian state media has used commemorations involving ethnic Korean communities to underscore historical ties that predate the Cold War division of the peninsula. South Korea, for its part, has aligned with Western sanctions regimes and military assistance to Ukraine — a position that creates friction with Moscow. In this environment, a commemoration that draws simultaneously on Soviet-era military history and Korean diasporic identity becomes something more than a private act of remembrance. It sits at the intersection of bilateral politics, generational memory, and the contested question of which histories a divided nation chooses to carry forward.

The sources reviewed for this article do not establish the specific identities or number of participants at the 2026 Seoul event, nor whether it marked the passing of a particular individual whose life had become a focal point for the community. What the reporting confirms is that the tradition persists in a city where most residents have no direct connection to the Soviet-era Korean diaspora. The portrait-bearers are by now several generations removed from the war generation itself — raising the question of what, beyond family biography, sustains the commitment to this particular commemoration in a country whose official memory culture has little space for it.

The answer likely lies in the character of the Immortal Regiment format itself. It does not require institutional permission or political alignment. A family carries a portrait; a neighbour walks alongside. In cities from Tbilisi to Toronto, this structure has allowed the ceremony to travel without Russian state sponsorship, though the funding and logistics behind international organising remain difficult to map. The Seoul procession, as reported by TASS, appears consistent with this pattern: organised from within the community, reported outward through Russian state-affiliated channels, and visible to passersby who may not have known to look.

The stakes of this visibility are uneven. For the families involved, the act of public commemoration is an assertion of existence — that these veterans lived, served, and in many cases died, and that their lives matter to someone. For South Korean policy audiences, the diaspora represents a largely unexamined inheritance from an era when the peninsula's borders were drawn by outside powers. For Russian soft power communicators, each new city that stages an Immortal Regiment procession, however small, reinforces the narrative that Victory Day has universal reach. None of these calculations requires the other to be wrong.

What remains unclear — and what the available reporting does not resolve — is whether the 2026 Seoul event marks a turning point for this community's public presence in South Korea, or whether it will remain an annual gathering invisible to the broader public. The sources reviewed for this article do not indicate that any particular figure who was the subject of commemoration has been identified by name. Monexus will continue to monitor reporting from the Korean diasporic community and Russian state-affiliated media for further developments.

This publication noted a discrepancy in editorial framing: while Western wire reporting on diaspora commemoration traditions tends to treat the Immortal Regiment as a Russian state project, the format's grass-roots structure and its adoption by communities with no direct affiliation to Moscow suggest a more distributed picture. The Seoul event, as reported, fits the latter pattern rather than the former.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/DDGeopolitics