On January 2, a young Ukrainian weapons inspector, Krystyna Kimachuk, was notified 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 get hold of her. Within a week, she had the mutilated remains laid out in front of her in a safe location in the capital Kiev, reports the BBC.
She began taking it apart and photographing every piece, including the screws and computer chips smaller than her fingernails. She realized almost immediately that it wasn’t a Russian missile, but her challenge was to prove it.
Amid the mess of metal and flowing wires, Krystyna Kimachuk noticed a small character from the Korean alphabet. Then he came across an even more telling detail. The number 112 had been stamped on some parts of the projectile. This corresponds to the year 2023 in the North Korean calendar. He realized that he was facing the first concrete evidence that North Korean weapons were being used to attack his country.
“I had heard that they had delivered some weapons to Russia, but I was able to see them, touch them, examine them in a way that no one had been able to do before. This was very interesting.” she told me on the phone from Kiev.
Since then, the Ukrainian military says dozens of North Korean missiles have been fired by Russia into its territory. They killed at least 24 people and injured more than 70.
For all the recent talk of Kim Jong Un preparing to start a nuclear war, the more immediate threat now is North Korea’s ability to fuel existing wars and fuel global instability.
Kimachuk works for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organization that recovers weapons used in war to learn how they were made. But it wasn’t until he finished photographing the wreckage of the rocket and his team analyzed its hundreds of components that the most startling revelation occurred.
Where do the components come from?
It was full of the latest foreign technology. Most of the electronic parts had been manufactured in the US and Europe in recent years. There was even an American computer chip manufactured as early as March 2023. This meant that North Korea had illegally procured vital components for the weapon, smuggled them into the country, assembled the missile and secretly shipped it to Russia, where it had been then transported to the front line and launched – all in just a few months.
“That was the biggest surprise, that despite being under severe sanctions for nearly two decades, North Korea still manages to get hold of everything it needs to make its weapons, and with extraordinary speed,” said Damien Spleeters, deputy director at 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 being used to kill people on European soil,” he said. He and his team at RUSI have been tracking North Korean arms shipments to Russia ever since Mr Kim met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Russia last September to seal an alleged arms deal.
Using satellite imagery, they were able to spot four Russian cargo ships shuttling between North Korea and a Russian military port, loaded with hundreds of containers at a time.
In total, RUSI estimates that 7,000 containers were sent, filled with more than a million rounds of ammunition and cluster rockets – the kind of rockets that can be launched from trucks in large bursts. Their assessments are supported by intelligence from the US, UK and South Korea, although Russia and North Korea have denied the trade.
A graphic shows the path of North Korean missiles towards Russia
“These shells and missiles are some of the most wanted things in the world today and allow Russia to continue bombing Ukrainian cities at a time when the US and Europe are vacillating over what weapons to contribute,” Byrne said.
Cheap and lots of it
But it’s the arrival of ballistic missiles on the battlefield that worries Byrne and his colleagues the most because of what it reveals about North Korea’s weapons program.
Since the 1980s, North Korea has sold its weapons abroad, mostly to countries in North Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, Syria and Iran. These tended to be old, Soviet-style missiles with a bad reputation. There is evidence that Hamas fighters may have used some of Pyongyang’s old rocket-propelled grenades in their attack on October 7 last year.
But the missile launched on January 2, which Krystyna Kimachuk dismantled, was apparently Pyongyang’s most sophisticated short-range missile – the Hwasong 11 – capable of traveling up to 700 km (435 miles).
Although the Ukrainians have downplayed their accuracy, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons and non-proliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, says they don’t appear to be much worse than Russian missiles.
The advantage of these rockets is that they are extremely cheap, Dr. Lewis explained. This means one can buy more and fire more in the hope of overwhelming air defenses, which is exactly what the Russians appear 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 munitions to Russia, saying that Pyongyang’s weapons factories were operating at full speed, and Dr. Lewis, who has studied these factories via satellite, believes that they can produce several hundred rockets a year.
Still stunned by their discovery, Spleeters and his team are now trying to figure out how this is possible, given that companies are banned from selling spare parts to North Korea.
Many of the computer chips that are integral to modern weapons, guiding them through the air to their targets, are the same chips that are used to power our phones, washing machines and cars, Spleeters says.
They are sold worldwide in impressive numbers. Manufacturers sell billions of units to distributors, and they resell millions of units to distributors, meaning they often have no idea where their products end up.
Even so, Byrne was frustrated to learn how many of the rocket’s components came from the West. It proved that North Korea’s procurement networks were more robust and efficient than even he, who investigates these networks, had realized.
In his experience, North Koreans based abroad set up fake companies in Hong Kong or other Central Asian countries to buy the items, mostly using stolen cash. They then ship the products to North Korea, usually across the border into China. If one bogus company is discovered and sanctioned, another quickly appears in its place.
Sanctions have long been considered an imperfect tool to combat these networks, but to have any chance of working, they must be updated and enforced regularly. Both Russia and China have refused to impose new sanctions on North Korea since 2017.
By buying weapons from Pyongyang, Moscow is now violating the same sanctions it once voted for as a member of the UN Security Council. Then, earlier this year, it effectively disbanded a UN panel of experts monitoring sanctions violations, presumably to avoid scrutiny.
“We are witnessing the real-time crumbling of UN sanctions against North Korea, which gives Pyongyang a lot of breathing room,” Byrne said.
All of this has implications that extend far beyond the war in Ukraine.
“The real winners here are the North Koreans,” Byrne said. “They helped the Russians in a significant way, and that bought them a ton of leverage.”
In March, RUSI documented large quantities of oil being transported from Russia to North Korea, while wagons full of what is believed to be rice and flour were spotted crossing the land border between the two countries. The deal, believed to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, will boost not only Pyongyang’s economy but also its military.
Tumangang Cargo Terminal Chart
Russia could provide the North with raw materials to continue building its missiles or even military equipment such as fighter jets, and — in the most extreme case — technical assistance to improve its nuclear weapons.
In addition, the North has the chance to test its latest missiles in a real war scenario for the first time. With this valuable data, you will be able to improve them.
Pyongyang: A major missile supplier?
Even more worrying is the fact that the war gives North Korea a “promotional stand” to 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, Dr. Lewis said — especially since the Russians are setting the example that it’s okay to break sanctions.
He predicts that in the future North Korea will become a major supplier of missiles to the countries of the China-Russia-Iran bloc. Following 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 grim faces when we talk about this issue,” Mr Spleeters said. “But the good news is that now we know how dependent they are on foreign technology, we can do something about it.”
Spleeters is optimistic that by working with manufacturers, they can cut off North Korea’s supply chains. His team has already been able to identify and shut down an illicit network before it can complete a critical sale.
But Dr. Lewis isn’t quite convinced. “We can make things more difficult, more inconvenient, maybe increase the costs, but none of that will stop North Korea from building these weapons,” he said, adding that the West had ultimately failed in its attempt to to limit the rogue state.
Today, not only are his rockets a source of prestige and political power, they also generate large sums of money for him, Dr. Lewis explained. So why would Kim Jong Un give them up now?
Tags: North Korean missiles kill Ukrainians implications greater previously thought
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