On January 2, a young Ukrainian weapons inspector, Khrystyna Kimachuk, learned that an unusual-looking missile had crashed into a building in the city of Kharkiv.
She began calling her contacts in the Ukrainian military, desperate to discuss it. Within a week, she had the fragments of the projectile in front of her in a safe place in the capital, kyiv.
Kimachuk began taking it apart and photographing every piece, including the screws and computer chips that were smaller than his fingernails. He almost immediately realized that It was not a Russian missile.but I had to prove it.
Hidden amidst the mess of metal and wires, Kimachuk saw a small character from the Korean alphabet. He then came across a more revealing detail: the number 112 had been stamped on parts of the casing. This corresponds to the year 2023 in the North Korean calendar.
Thus, he realized that he was facing the first conclusive evidence that they were using north korean weapons to attack his country.
“We had heard that some weapons had been delivered to Russia, but I was able to see them, touch them and investigate them in a way that no one had been able to do before. It was very exciting,” he told me over the phone from Kyiv.
Since then, the Ukrainian military says that Russia has fired dozens of North Korean missiles towards its territory. These have killed at least 24 people and injured more than 70.
Despite all the recent rumors that Kim Jong Un is preparing to start a nuclear war, the most immediate threat is now North Korea’s ability to fuel existing wars and global instability.
Kimachuk works for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organization that recovers weapons used in war, to discover how they were made. But it wasn’t until he finished photographing the remains of the missile, and his team analyzed its hundreds of pieces, that the most surprising revelation came.
It was full of components of the latest foreign technology. Most of the electronic parts were manufactured in United States and Europe During the last years. There was even an American computer chip created in March 2023.
This meant that North Korea had illicitly acquired vital weapons components, smuggled them into the country, assembled the missile, and secretly shipped it to Russia, where it had then been transported to the front lines and used, all in a matter of months.
“This was the biggest surprise: despite being under severe sanctions for almost two decades, North Korea is still managing to get everything it needs to manufacture their weapons, and at extraordinary speed,” says Damien Spleeters, deputy director of CAR.
In London, Joseph Byrne, a North Korea expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defense think tank, was equally stunned.
“I never thought I would see North Korean ballistic missiles used to kill people on European soil,” he said. He and his team at RUSI have been tracking the shipment of North Korean weapons to Russia since Kim met with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Russia in September last year to close an alleged arms deal.
Using satellite images, they have been able to observe four Russian cargo ships going back and forth between North Korea and a Russian military portloaded with hundreds of containers at a time.
In total, RUSI estimates that they have been sent 7,000 containerswith more than a million ammunition casings and Grad rockets, the type that can be fired from trucks in large bursts.
Their assessments are backed by intelligence from the United States, Britain and South Korea, although Russia and North Korea have denied such trade.
“These shells and rockets are some of the most sought-after things in the world today and are allowing Russia to continue attacking Ukrainian cities at a time when the US and Europe have been wondering what weapons to contribute,” Byrne notes.
cheap missiles
But it is the arrival of ballistic missiles on the battlefield that has most concerned Byrne and his colleagues, because of what they reveal about the North Korea’s weapons program.
Since the 1980s, North Korea has sold its weapons abroad, primarily to countries in North Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, Syria and Iran. They are usually old, Soviet-style missiles with a bad reputation.
There is evidence that Hamas fighters likely used some of Pyongyang’s older rocket-propelled grenades in their October 7 attack.
But the missile fired on January 2 that Kimachuk dismantled was apparently Pyongyang’s most sophisticated short-range missile, the Hwasong 11, capable of traveling up to 700 kilometers.
Although the Ukrainians have downplayed their accuracy, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons and nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, says they don’t appear to be much worse than Russian missiles.
The advantage of these missiles is that they are extremely cheap, explains Lewis. This means you can buy more and shoot more, hoping to collapse air defenses, which is exactly what the Russians seem to be doing.
This then raises the question of how many of these missiles the North Koreans can produce.
The South Korean government recently noted that North Korea had sent 6,700 containers of ammunition to Russia. He believes Pyongyang’s weapons factories were operating at full capacity, and Lewis, who has been studying these factories via satellites, estimates they can produce about a hundred a year.
Strong networks
Still amazed by their discovery, Spleeters and his team are trying to figure out how this is possible, given that companies are prohibited from selling parts to North Korea.
Many of the computer chips that are integral to modern weapons, guiding them through the air to their intended targets, are the same chips used in our phones, washing machines and cars, Spleeters explains.
These are marketed all over the world in staggering quantities. Manufacturers send billions to distributors, who sell them for millions, meaning they often They have no idea where their products end up.
Still, Byrne was frustrated to learn how many of the missile’s components came from the West. This showed that North Korea’s procurement networks were more robust and effective than even he, who investigates these networks, had thought.
In their experience, North Koreans based abroad set up fake companies in Hong Kong or other Central Asian countries to purchase items predominantly using stolen money.
They then ship the products to North Korea, usually across its border with China. If a fake company is discovered and sanctioned, another will quickly appear in its place.
Sanctions have long been considered an imperfect tool to combat these networks, but to have any hope of working they must be regularly updated and enforced. So much Russia and China have refused to impose new sanctions to North Korea since 2017.
By purchasing weapons from Pyongyang, Moscow is violating the same sanctions it once voted for as a member of the UN Security Council. Then, earlier this year, it effectively disbanded a U.N. panel monitoring sanctions violations, likely to avoid scrutiny.
“We are witnessing the real-time crumbling of UN sanctions against North Koreawhich gives Pyongyang a lot of room to breathe,” Byrne says.
All of this has implications that go far beyond the war in Ukraine.
“The real winners here are the North Koreans,” Byrne says. “They have helped the Russians significantly, and this has given them great influence.”
In March, RUSI documented the shipment of large quantities of Petroleum from Russia to North Korea, while wagons full of what are believed to be rice and flour have been seen crossing the countries’ land border.
This deal, believed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, It will boost not only Pyongyang’s economy, but also its military.
Russia could also supply the North with raw materials to continue manufacturing its missiles, or even military equipment such as fighter jets and, in the most extreme case, technical assistance to improve its nuclear weapons.
Additionally, the North has the opportunity to test its latest missiles in a real war scenario for the first time. With this valuable data, you can improve them.
Pyongyang: a major missile supplier?
Even more worrying is that the war is giving North Korea a showcase for the rest of the world.
Now that Pyongyang is mass producing these weapons, it will want to sell them to more countries, and if the missiles are good enough for Russia, they will be good enough for others, Lewis says, especially since the Russians are setting the example that it is okay to violate the sanctions.
Lewis predicts that in the future North Korea will become a major supplier of missiles to the countries of the China-Russia-Iran bloc. In the wake of Iran’s attack on Israel this month, the US said it was “incredibly concerned” that North Korea could be working with Iran on its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs.
“I see a lot of gloomy faces when we talk about this problem,” says Spleeters. “But the good news is that now that we know how dependent they are on foreign technology, we can do something about it.”
The analyst is optimistic and thinks that By working with manufacturers they will be able to cut North Korean supply chains. His team has already managed to identify and shut down an illicit network before it could complete a critical sale.
But Lewis is not convinced. “We can make it more difficult, more inconvenient, maybe increase the cost, but none of this will stop North Korea from making these weapons,” he says, adding that the West has ultimately failed in its attempt to contain the rogue state. .
Now his missiles are not only a source of prestige and political power, but they are also generating enormous amounts of money, Lewis explains. So why would Kim Jong-un abandon them now?
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