The evidence confirming the military collaboration of the North Korean regime with Russia for its war in Ukraine is becoming more and more compelling. At the end of April, UN experts concluded that Putin’s troops used January 2 a North Korean ballistic missile during an attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
In the 32-page report, United Nations sanctions monitors noted that “The recovered debris comes from a DPRK Hwasong-11 series missile” and violate the arms embargo on North Korea.
Khrystyna Kimachuk She is a young Ukrainian weapons inspector. That January 2, after learning of the attack on a building in Kharkiv, she contacted her contacts in the Army to request access to the remains of the missile, since it had caught the attention of Ukrainian forces due to its unusual appearance.
Finally, a week later he had access to those remains in the capital kyiv.
He disassembled them and photographed each of the pieces, including small computer chips. He immediately realized that it was not a Russian missile.
During the inspection he observed a small character from the Korean alphabet. But later she came across an even more revealing detail. In some parts of the frame it was stamped the number 112; number that corresponds to the year 2023 of the North Korean calendar. At that moment he realized that he had in his hands the first conclusive evidence that North Korean weapons were being used to attack his country.
“We had heard that they had delivered some weapons to Russia, but I could see them, touch them, investigate them, in a way that no one had been able to do before. It was very exciting,” the Ukrainian inspector commented to the BBC.
Since then, the Ukrainian Army denounced that Russia launched dozens of North Korean missiles against its territory.causing the death of at least 24 people and more than 70 injuries.
Kimachuk, who works for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organization that recovers weapons used in war to find out how they were made, discovered that The Hwasong-11 missile had the latest foreign technology.
As detailed, a large part of the electronic parts had been manufactured in the United States and Europe in recent years. In fact, a North American chip manufactured in March 2023 was found. This proves, at the same time, another complaint that the West has been making for years: that the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un, with the collaboration of his allies, flouts international sanctions to illicitly acquire vital components for its weapons program.
The inspector concluded that these components secretly arrived in Pyongyang, where they were assembled into the missile, and later sent to Russia. “This was the biggest surprise: despite being subject to severe sanctions for almost two decades, “North Korea continues to manage to obtain everything it needs to manufacture its weapons, and with extraordinary speed.”declared, for his part, Damien Spleetersdeputy director of CAR.
Since Putin received Kim Jong-un in Russia in September last year, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has been monitoring, through satellite images, the shipment of North Korean weapons to Moscow. The institute estimates that nearly 7,000 containers have been sent, filled with more than a million large-caliber projectiles and rockets. These estimates are close to those recently observed by the South Korean government, which estimates the shipment of ammunition containers to Russia at 6,700.
This way, The Kremlin is violating the same sanctions it once voted for in the UN Security Council. At the beginning of the year he even dissolved a panel that monitored compliance with those sanctions. On March 28, the Council failed to approve the renewal of the mandate of the panel of experts, originally created in 2006, due to the veto exercised by Moscow.
“We are witnessing the real-time unraveling of UN sanctions against North Korea, giving Pyongyang a huge respite,” said Joseph Byrne, a North Korea expert at RUSI.
Likewise, he acknowledged that North Korea’s supply networks are no more solid and effective than believed. In that sense, Byrne explained that North Koreans established abroad set up fake companies in Hong Kong or other Central Asian countries to buy the items using mainly stolen money. They then ship the products to North Korea, usually across its border with China.
This growing influence of North Korea is already causing great concern in the West. In dialogue with BBCthe doctor Jeffrey Lewisan expert on North Korean weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, warned that Kim Jong-un’s regime could become a major supplier of missiles to countries in the China-Russia-Iran bloc.
Against this background, North Korea this Sunday harshly criticized the plans of Washington and its allies to try to establish a new mechanism to supervise compliance with UN sanctions on Pyongyang after the panel of experts in charge of this task was dissolved. last week.
In an editorial published by the state agency KCNAthe North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, Kim Songcondemned the statement that the United States and 49 other countries published on May 1 expressing their desire to devise a new system to independently analyze compliance with sanctions in order to prevent North Korean weapons of mass destruction programs from progressing.
“It is not surprising that the United States and other Western countries, which have perpetuated their acquired rights by inflicting misfortune and pain on other nations under the pretext of ensuring global peace and security, deeply regret the end of that corrupt body,” Kim writes of the panel of experts that was dissolved on April 30.
