A senior Ukrainian intelligence official told Reuters in a report published on Wednesday that Russia had begun deploying a North Korean missile unit to its war theater against Ukraine, apparently exploiting potential vulnerabilities the invaded country has against ballistic missiles.
According to the report, the North Korean hardware is active in Russia’s Voronezh, which borders the occupied Ukrainian region of Luhansk, one of the two Donbas regions strongman Vladimir Putin “annexed” in the early months of the invasion. The official sharing the information, Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, said the new missile unit “could be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine.” He estimated that about 90 North Korean troops are in Voronezh and are expected to help operate the newly arrived missile units.
North Korea has been an active belligerent in the Russian invasion of Ukraine since at least late 2024, when Ukrainian intelligence officials first began observing North Korean troops fighting alongside the Russians. That year, Putin visited Pyongyang for the first time in two decades and signed a “mutual defense treaty” with communist dictator Kim Jong-un, which preceded the Kim regime becoming a much more vocal supporter of the Russian invasion on the world stage and ultimately publicly confirming its participation in the war. Kim has claimed, however, that North Korean troops in Russia were there only to clear landmines placed by Ukrainians, contrary to evidence that Pyongyang has played a larger offensive role in the conflict.
Reuters noted that it could not independently verify the Ukrainian intelligence official’s claims or receive any meaningful response from Pyongyang or Moscow. Ukrainian media has documented the use of North Korean missiles against its targets in the past week, however. Cherniak stated that North Korean ballistic missiles, in particular, had been active against Ukraine since at least August 2025. North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles were allegedly used to bomb civilian residences in Ukraine last week.
Ukrainian officials and state media expressed concern that the ballistic missiles were harder to intercept than other models and that they were also much less precise than other projectiles being used and therefore more likely to hit civilians. According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s only mode of intercepting the North Korean missiles is through the use of the American Patriot missile system.
The strikes last week reportedly killed at least six members of one family on the outskirts of the city of Kryvyi Rih.
“Ukrainian investigators later found another KN-23 impact crater roughly 2.2 miles away in an open field with no apparent military target nearby,” the Ukrainian state-affiliated United 24 reported.
The report accusing North Korea of shipping large numbers of ballistic missiles to Russia follows a warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week that Russia was preparing to deploy as many as 30,000 more North Korean troops to the Ukrainian war theater. In a message on the social media platform Telegram, Zelensky warned that North Korea benefitted from real-world battle experience that could endanger its enemies in conflicts unrelated to Ukraine.
“Russia is helping North Korea learn warfare, improve its weapons, and gain real combat experience. All of this is a threat to everyone in Asia within range of North Korean missiles. We will respond,” Zelensky wrote.
Prior reports estimate that, since 2024, North Korea has sent about 15,000 troops to Europe to fight against Ukraine.
While North Korea’s state media arms — the only legal media in the country — have not weighed in on the Reuters report, the flagship Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) published a variety of pro-Russian propaganda in the last week. On Wednesday, it shared a diatribe accusing the United States and other Western countries of a “crackdown on peaceful demonstrations and rallies, forcible deportations and inhumane treatment of refugees and migrants, discrimination against indigenous peoples, radical nationalism, racism, and connivance at neo-Nazism,” citing a Russian “human rights” report.
On August 1, KCNA warned that NATO was engaging in alleged “frantic war preparations,” citing the Pacific military exercises RIMPAC.
“In a word, it is the evil intention of NATO to stockpile enough fuel and other war supplies and thus kindle the flames of war any time in any part of the world,” the North Korean propaganda outlet claimed.
The Russian government has not publicly addressed the latest report. Putin, however, spent much of Wednesday reorganizing the leadership of his operations in Ukraine. Notably, the leader named the head of Russia’s “unmanned systems forces,” described in the Russian news agency Tass as a “newly created branch of the military.” Putin also replaced the head of the central military unit in charge of fighting in occupied Donetsk, the other Donbass region of Ukraine.
North Korea sent its foreign minister, Choe Son-hui, to Moscow in July to meet with counterpart Sergey Lavrov. The statements from both countries regarding the meeting did not specify any military plans, but ominously noted the two “agreed to accelerate cooperation centered on implementing their [2024 mutual defense] treaty, reaffirming their commitment to develop bilateral relations ‘under the strategic guidance at the highest level.’”
