South Korea's international aid agency has decided to bring back one of its two staff members from its office in Ukraine's capital Kyiv on safety grounds, the Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday, in a report carried by Reuters.

Source: Reuters via Yonhap

Kyiv has come under increasingly heavy Russian drone and missile attacks in recent weeks, more than four and a half years after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The decision by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) was made after a safety meeting, Yonhap said, citing an official of the agency. The other staff member will stay in Kyiv, it added.

A diplomatic row in the background

South Korea has also been caught up in a diplomatic dispute with Ukraine. Seoul withdrew its ambassador this month after accusing Kyiv of breaching a confidentiality agreement over the transfer of two captured North Korean soldiers to South Korea. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN General Assembly in September that Ukraine had transferred the two men, who Seoul says were captured while fighting for Russia. Seoul said the disclosure breached an understanding to keep the transfer confidential in order to protect the soldiers and their families in North Korea.

The KOICA official cited by Yonhap did not mention the dispute over the prisoners, and the agency presented the repatriation purely as a safety decision. No date for the staff member's return was given in the report.