North Korea has sent another 8,500 soldiers to Russia, among them 400 drone operators, taking the total rotated through the country since October 2024 to around 25,000.

Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian intelligence expects Putin to ask for up to 50,000 more North Korean troops when the two meet in September.

Most of the new contingent is in Russia's Kursk region, along with roughly 1,000 engineers and sappers reinforcing rear positions, said Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate, in an interview with CNN. The drone operators, who have served in Russia before, are expected to fly reconnaissance and strike missions into Ukraine from Russian soil.

Skibitskyi said the North Koreans are not expected to fight inside Ukraine. Their job is to hold the rear so Russian units can be moved forward - which is a cheaper way of generating combat power than mobilising more Russians, and one that costs the Kremlin nothing politically at home.

The hardware is arriving alongside the men. Ukrainian military intelligence confirmed on August 20 that North Korea had transferred around 50 KN-23, KN-24 and upgraded KN-30 ballistic missiles as of July, and the Institute for the Study of War reported the next day that six launchers had been deployed in Voronezh Oblast, the Kyiv Post reported.

From Voronezh those launchers reach Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia. Between them they could fire up to 120 missiles, on the institute's count. Around 90 North Korean personnel have deployed to operate them.

A North Korean short-range ballistic missile of the Hwasong-11 family launching from a transporter-erector-launcher. Source: KCNA.

The KN-30, or Hwasong-11C, is the newest of the three and the reason the deployment matters. It is an upgraded KN-23 with a reported range of 600-900 km and a warhead of up to 2,500 kg, against 480 kg on Russia's own Iskander-M.

Accuracy is the trade-off. Ukrainian military expert Anatoly Khrapchinsky said the Iskander-M lands within roughly 5 to 20 metres of its aim point, while North Korean KN-23s have missed by hundreds of metres and sometimes kilometres. Against a city that distinction matters less than the crater size.

Russia already fields around 160 Iskander launchers carrying two missiles each, and typically fires 16 to 26 in a strike package, Khrapchinsky said. The North Korean launchers do not transform that arithmetic - what they do is give Moscow a second, independent supply line for ballistic missiles at a moment when Ukraine's interceptor stocks are running dry.

The institute said it has seen no evidence Russian forces have yet used the KN-30 against Ukraine.

The relationship reaches well past weapons. Russia issued around 36,000 visas to North Korean citizens in 2025, four times the previous year's total, with many going to construction sites, NEXTA reported - an arrangement that remains formally problematic under the UN sanctions imposed in 2017. Pyongyang has earned an estimated $13bn from supplying Russia's war machine.

Ukrainian intelligence expects Putin to ask for up to 50,000 more troops when he meets Kim Jong Un in September. Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's sister, has called such claims "groundless".