North Korea has "given dud artillery shells to Russia"

Kim Jong-un has given 1.5 million artillery shells to Vladimir Putin after their meeting last year, but half of them are duds, a Ukrainian intelligence chief has said.

According to Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, deputy chief of Kyiv’s intelligence directorate, North Korea is also supplying 500kg ballistic missiles that are being used in Ukraine, but the artillery shells that it has sent are more than half a century old, The Times reports.

“As of today, taking into account the available statistics, Russia has already imported 1.5 million rounds of ammunition from the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” he told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. “However, these shells were made in the 70s and 80s. Half of them do not work and the rest need to be either repaired or checked before being used.”

He added, “[North Korea] gives away old stuff … ramps up the domestic production and asks for certain technologies in exchange, particularly missile and submarine technologies with the aim of developing its own defence industry. This proves once again that Russia lacks its own production capacity for a rapid and powerful increase in missile production. If it did not, why would it ask North Korea?”

Another senior Ukrainian intelligence officer, Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov, said last month that North Korea was presently Russia’s biggest supplier of weapons. “This allowed Russia to breathe a little,” he told the Financial Times. “Without their help, the situation would have been catastrophic.”

Kim spent five days in Russia in September and met Putin at the Vostochny spaceport in Siberia. He also visited military factories and inspected warplanes, missile systems and the Russian navy at its Far East base in Vladivostok. Although no announcement was made, it is clear that the two leaders agreed on the transfer of North Korean arms in return for Russian technical help with its efforts to launch spy satellites.

How much that has amounted to is not clear, and those who have ventured estimates may have motives for exaggeration. South Korea, which has been in an armed confrontation with its fraternal neighbour for over 70 years, said last month that based on volumes of containers sent to Russia, the North could have supplied three million artillery shells.

“While North Korea’s arms factories operate at 30 per cent capacity due to shortages of raw materials and power, certain factories are operating at full capacity, which primarily produces weapons and shells for Russia,” the South Korean defence minister, Shin Won-sik, said last week.