Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak has announced that Russia has begun firing ballistic missiles provided by North Korea into Ukraine amid growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.
“Russia has hit Ukraine with missiles supplied by North Korea for the first time during its invasion, Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said on Friday, corroborating an earlier assertion by Washington.
‘As part of its outright genocidal war, the Russian Federation for the first time struck at the territory of Ukraine with missiles received from North Korea’, Podolyak wrote on X social media.
Podolyak did not provide evidence for the missiles being North Korean. In its statement on Thursday, Washington cited declassified intelligence.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
Earlier on Friday, state media quoted the governor of the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv as saying missiles produced outside Russia had been fired into the province at the end of December and beginning of January.
Kharkiv region prosecutors said they were conducting an investigation into the country of origin of three missiles used by Russia to hit the provincial capital on Tuesday. Their statement did not name North Korea.
That attack on Kharkiv city killed two people and wounded 62, the prosecutor's office said.
Ukraine's air force said earlier on Friday it could not yet confirm the country of manufacture of the missiles in question.
While the United States would not say specifically what type of missiles Pyongyang had sent to Russia, U.S. spokesman John Kirby said they had a range of about 900 km (550 miles). He released a graphic that appeared to show KN-23 and KN-25 short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs).
North Korea has been under a United Nations arms embargo since it first tested a nuclear bomb in 2006.
U.N. Security Council resolutions, approved with Russian support, ban countries from trading weapons or other military equipment with North Korea.
In November, South Korean authorities said North Korea may have supplied SRBMs to Russia as part of a larger arms deal that also included anti-tank and anti-air missiles, artillery and mortar shells, and rifles.
Both Moscow and Pyongyang have previously denied conducting any arms deals, but vowed last year to deepen military relations”. -Max Hunder and Yuliia Dysa, Reuters
While Russia ignores international calls to cease making arms deals with regimes under sanctions like North Korea and Iran, Pyongyang has, in exchange, received technological assistance in its development of advanced weaponry from Moscow.
In the meantime, North Korea has reportedly fired over two hundred artillery rounds off its west coast, near South Korea's Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong islands.
“Following a series of provocative US and South Korean war games, North Korea responded by a major artillery drill. Pyongyang fired over 200 rounds in the direction of a disputed border group of South Korean islands. Seoul subsequently ordered the evacuation of residents of two islands.
On Friday, North Korean forces fired artillery toward South Korea’s Yeonpyeong island group. In a statement published on North Korean state media, Pyongyang said its military ’staged a naval live-shell firing drill into five districts with 192 shells by mobilizing 47 cannons of various calibers of 13 companies and 1 platoon force from 09:00 to 11:00 on January 5th’.
Seoul responded by ordering the evacuation of the island and holding live-fire military exercises. Pyongyang said Seoul overreacted to the North Korean drills. ‘The claim of the military gangsters of the Republic of Korea that the KPA fired naval artillery shells into the waters north of Paekryong Island and Yonphyong Island, a so-called buffer zone in the West Sea of Korea, is a far-fetched assertion to mislead the public opinion, and their evacuation and firing in return are also a trite method to throw the responsibility for the escalating tension on the KPA’s drill’, KCNA reports. ‘The direction of naval live-shell firing doesn’t give even an indirect effect on Paekryong and Yonphyong islands’.
Pyongyang said the drills were in response to U.S. and South Korean war games. ‘The naval live-shell firing drill conducted in the southwestern sea is a sort of natural countermeasure taken by the KPA against the military actions of the ROK military gangsters who staged large-scale artillery firing and maneuvers in the vicinity of the entire border area’, the KCNA writes. ‘The military gangsters of the ROK should neither say this or that about the responsibility for escalating tension nor bring misfortune on themselves’.
In the past month, the U.S. and South Korea held a series of provocative war games. The drills included simulating the assassination of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, submarine live-fire drills, and joint war games with the U.S. involving heavy weapons near the shared Korean border”. -Kyle Anzalone, Antiwar
Aside from the United States government being concerned over North Korean ballistic missiles purportedly being used to sustain Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, what the U.S. should find even more troubling is the possibility that a potential Taiwan Strait war would divide American military forces between South Korea and Taiwan, which could soften the defense of South Korea in the event of an invasion from the North.