Ukraine: Russia has fired 24 North Korean missiles so far

Russia has fired at least 24 ballistic missiles of North Korean origin at Ukraine since late December, according to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin.

“Preliminarily they are identified as Kn-23/24,” Kostin told reporters on Friday.

Between Dec. 30 and Feb. 7 Kremlin troops launched at least 12 attacks on seven regions — including the capital Kyiv and Kharkiv in the northeast — with the missiles, causing multiple fatalities, he said.

The information on the missiles’ likely origin has been confirmed by the Ukrainian defense ministry’s Armaments Research Institute and the prosecutor general’s office.

The specialists analyzed the projectiles’ tracking data, flight path, level of destruction, debris, marking and symbols. They concluded that the rockets have larger diameters than related Russian and Sovietera models.

The accuracy of the missiles is questionable, the official said.

Only two of the roughly two dozen hit the targets they were believed to be intended for. Those were Ukraine’s Kremenchuk oil refinery and the Kanatove airfield, both in the central region. The rest either deviated from their path or exploded in the air, Kostin said.

The prosecutor general’s office is continuing its examination of the missiles and their components and plans to publish the results soon. So far the agency has no information on how many shells have already been delivered or are planned to be delivered to Russia by Kim Jong Un’s regime.

U.S. intelligence in early January confirmed that Russia had started to fire North Korean missiles over Ukraine.

The Biden administration has highlighted Russia’s attempts to gather equipment from countries like Iran and North Korea to argue that sanctions and the battlefield efforts of Ukraine and its allies have drained Russian military reserves – and necessitate further arms shipments from the U.S.

Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in eastern Russia in September, talks which the US said were focused on furthering arms deals between their countries.