The US Army has warned that North Korea is using the war in Ukraine as a “battlefield laboratory”.
North Korea has repeatedly been accused of providing Russia with advanced nuclear-capable ballistic missiles that are swiftly deployable and difficult to shoot down.
It is thought that Russia has fired dozens of these North Korean missiles during the war. Pyongyang is known to have handed over artillery shells as well.
The commander of the Pacific Army, General Charles Flynn, issued the warning during a visit to a US military base in South Korea.
He said that North Korea was battle-testing its missiles on an unprecedented scale.
General Flynn noted that this marks the first time the DPRK can test its missiles in real combat operations.
He said that the US was monitoring the situation but that Kim Jong-Un’s regime had already obtained valuable information on technical issues, procedures, and the missiles themselves.
General Flynn said: “I don’t believe that in my recent memory that the North Korean military has had a battlefield laboratory quite like the Russians are affording them to have in Ukraine.”
Russia has largely used the Hwasong-11s, a broad class of short-range North Korean ballistic missiles that can strike targets reliably with high accuracy.
Pyongyang has always denied supplying Russia with arms, despite satellite photos showing the flow of weapons from North Korea to Russia and then to munitions dumps near the border with Ukraine.
South Korea claims that Kim Jong-un is not just receiving the chance to battlefield-test his arms but that Russia is providing North Korea with food, raw materials, and parts for more weapons manufacturing.
The United States has warned that the security threat posed by North Korea could increase “drastically” in the next decade thanks to its cooperation with Russia.
Last week, Kim Jong-un oversaw the test of a new ballistic missile designed to deploy a hypersonic glide vehicle that can deliver a nuclear bomb to US bases in Japan and Guam.
