By Tom Balmforth
LONDON, Aug 5 (Reuters) – A North Korean missile unit has begun deploying to western Russia and could be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine, an official at Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said.
Ukraine is very short of high-end air defences and Russia has tried to exploit this by using more ballistic missiles, which are particularly hard to shoot down.
Russia has fired scores of North Korean ballistic missiles at Ukraine since late 2023, but the deployment of North Korean missile forces would be an expansion of the already extensive military cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang.
Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence said Russia planned to base the missile unit of around 90 North Korean personnel in the western Russian region of Voronezh, within its 112th Missile Brigade.
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Pyongyang has already sent a new batch of 40 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles and personnel to Russia, but the configuration of the deployment and total number of missiles will be finalised at top-level talks next month, he said.
Russia expects the deployment to involve 120 North Korean ballistic missiles and six launchers, he said.
It is not clear what precise role the North Koreans would play in Russian missile operations.
The deployment described by Cherniak appears to coincide with Russia last week firing its first two North Korean missiles at Ukraine since last August.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank, said the North Korean resources were a significant threat for Kyiv.
“Ballistic missile defence is one of Ukraine’s greatest vulnerabilities so any increase in the quantities of ballistic missiles they face will pose a greater challenge,” he said.
A particularly big concern for Ukraine will be the state of its air defences this winter, when Russia could again target the power grid with heavy attacks as in past years, he added.
Reuters could not independently verify Cherniak’s assertions, which he said were based on intelligence that could not be disclosed because of the sensitivities.
The Russian Defence Ministry and North Korea’s embassy at the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to written requests for comment.
North Korea has emerged as a close ally of Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the two powers signed a mutual defence pact in 2024.
North Korea has supplied millions of artillery shells to Russia’s war effort and sent 14,000 troops to Russia’s Kursk region to repel a Ukrainian ground incursion in 2024, Ukrainian officials say.
Last week, Ukrainian authorities said a North Korean missile had flattened a residential home in the central Ukrainian village of Radushne, killing at leasy five members of the same family.
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Cherniak said last week’s strike was the first that had been recorded as using North Korean ballistic missiles since August 2025, and that it had drawn from the new batch of 40 missiles, confirming earlier Reuters reporting.
North Korea’s KN-23 and KN-24 missiles have a greater range and larger payload than Russia’s equivalent, Iskander, but are much less accurate and have been linked to strikes with high civilian death tolls, Ukrainian military sources say.
The use of KN-23/24 missiles fits a pattern in which Russia has tried to use more ballistic missiles like its Iskander 9M723 that can only be stopped by U.S.-made Patriot air defence systems.
Russia began firing KN-23 and KN-24 missiles at Ukraine towards the end of 2023. North Korea supplied 150 of the missiles between the end of 2023 and August 2025, Cherniak said.
He said there were around 9,500 North Korean troops in Russia’s Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, but that they were not currently directly involved in military operations against Ukraine.
Zelenskiy said last month that the Kremlin wanted North Korea to send another 30,000 troops, and that Russian preparations were under way to receive them in the Voronezh region.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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