Ri Ul-sol
North Korean Army Marshal (1921-2015)
Ri Ul-sol (Korean: 리을설; 14 September 1921 – 7 November 2015) was a North Korean politician and military official. He played an important role in the administrations of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, achieving the rank of marshal of the Korean People's Army. He was responsible for the safety of top North Korean leaders and their families as Commander of the Guard.
Early life and education
Ri Ul-sol was born in 1921 in Songjin, North Hamgyong Province.
He may have been trained at the Okeanskaya Field School in Vladivostok or in the RKKA Military Academy in Khabarovsk, both in the Soviet Union.
Military career
In the late 1930s, Ri was a soldier in Kim Il Sung's United Army, which was a partisan unit. He fought for Korea's independence from Japan alongside Kim Il Sung in World War II. Ri served in the 88th Sniper Brigade with Kim Il Sung, Kim Chol-man and other first-generation North Korean politicians. During the outbreak of the Korean War, Ri Ul-sol was responsible for the care of Kim Jong Il and Kim Kyong-hui, the children of Kim Il Sung. It is said that Ri assumed the position of surrogate father to Kim Jong Il, the future North Korean leader.
He was promoted through the North Korean military system, earning the following ranks:
He was one of only a handful to have been promoted to the rank of Marshal, the second highest North Korean military rank.
“Ri Ul-sol” enters the record as north Korean Army Marshal (1921-2015). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ul-sol, North and Korean can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q709705. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ri Ul-sol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.