120 Missiles, Six Launchers, 90 Operators: North Korea's Missile Troops Are Now Inside Russia

Pyongyang isn't just shipping missiles to Russia anymore. It's sending the crews.

Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) told Reuters on August 5 that North Korea has begun deploying a dedicated missile unit to western Russia, with plans to field up to 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for use against Ukraine. We flagged the report on our Telegram the morning it broke. Here's the deeper picture.

What HUR is actually claiming

Per HUR spokesperson Andrii Cherniak, roughly 90 North Korean personnel from a DPRK missile unit are being stationed in Russia's Voronezh region, about 95 miles from the Ukrainian border, where they're being integrated into Russia's 112th Missile Brigade. Around 40 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles have reportedly been delivered in the most recent tranche, against a planned force of 120. The final scale and command structure is expected to be settled at Moscow–Pyongyang talks slated for September.

Read that integration detail again. This isn't a transfer of crates. It's North Korean crews embedded inside a Russian missile brigade's order of battle, inside Russia, launching at Ukraine.

The weapon

Russian Iskander-M, Vostok-2014 exercises, the system the KN-23 clones. Photo: Russian MOD (mil.ru) via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

The KN-23 (North Korean designation Hwasong-11Ga) is Pyongyang's clone-and-improve take on the Russian Iskander-M, a road-mobile, quasi-ballistic short-range missile that flies a depressed, maneuvering trajectory designed to stress missile defenses. Compared to the Iskander, the North Korean rounds carry a larger payload and fly farther, but historically with worse accuracy. That gap has been closing: Ukrainian officials have repeatedly assessed that DPRK missile precision improved after Russia began feeding combat data back to Pyongyang, which is exactly the trade Kim signed up for. Russia gets magazines of ammunition; North Korea gets a live-fire R&D program someone else pays for in cities.

The human cost of that "low accuracy" is not abstract. KN-23 strikes have been tied to mass-casualty hits on civilian areas, including the Radushne strike that killed ten members of one family.

How we got here, the cooperation timeline

Photo: kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

• Late 2023: First DPRK ballistic missiles delivered to Russia; roughly 150 KN-23/KN-24s supplied since, per Ukrainian intelligence.

• January 2024: First confirmed combat use of a North Korean ballistic missile against Ukraine (Kharkiv), later verified through debris analysis.

• June 2024: Putin and Kim sign the comprehensive strategic partnership treaty with a mutual-defense clause, the legal scaffolding for everything that followed.

• Fall 2024: ~14,000 DPRK troops deploy to the Kursk front; roughly 9,500 reportedly remain in Russia today, currently out of direct combat.

• 2023–2026: An estimated 8–11 million artillery shells shipped via covert maritime routes, at points covering up to 350,000 shells a month, a meaningful share of Russia's entire expenditure.

• 2025 reporting: Roughly one-third of ballistic missiles Russia fired at Ukraine in some periods were North Korean KN-23s.

• July 2026: Zelensky warns Moscow is seeking 30,000 additional North Korean troops.

• August 2026: HUR: the missile unit itself deploys to Voronezh.

Why this matters

1. Supplier to operator is an escalation of kind, not degree. Foreign crews operating strike systems from Russian soil against Ukraine puts DPRK forces in a direct combat role far beyond the Kursk infantry deployment, and gives North Korea's Strategic Force something it has never had: sustained, real-war launch experience against a defended, NATO-supplied target set.

2. Every launch is a test flight for the next war. The data loop that improved KN-23 accuracy over Ukraine flows straight back into the missiles pointed at Seoul and Tokyo. Ukraine is functioning as North Korea's proving ground, and the tuition is being paid by Ukrainian air defense, and Ukrainian civilians.

3. Watch September. If the Moscow–Pyongyang talks formalize the 120-missile force structure, expect the Voronezh footprint to grow, and expect launches attributed to the 112th Missile Brigade to carry a DPRK signature more often. Debris analysis from future strikes, fin geometry, weld patterns, component sourcing, will be the confirmation channel to watch.

4. Sanctions are functionally dead on this axis. Maritime shell transfers, missile deliveries, and now personnel, each was supposed to be a red line under existing UN resolutions. The lesson other proliferators are taking notes on: the enforcement regime folds when a Security Council member is the customer.

The bottom line

Two years ago the question was whether North Korean missiles were even in the fight. Today the question is how large the North Korean missile force in Russia will be by winter. That's the trajectory, and it's exactly the kind of story we'll keep tracking from the ground and from open sources.

Project Leaflet has covered the DPRK's footprint in this war since the first Kursk deployments, including artifacts recovered from that front, now documented in our War Collectibles archive. Follow the daily feed on Telegram (t.me/TheLeaflet) and the deeper files here in the The Daily Sitrep.

Sources

Reuters (via Kyiv Post: kyivpost.com/post/81746) · United24 Media · Ukrainska Pravda (pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/08/05/8047356) · Kyiv Independent · Militarnyi on the first confirmed KN-23 use against Kharkiv.