Russia's use of North Korean missiles in Ukraine could be a 'cash cow' for Kim Jong Un, expert says

• Russia has used North Korean missiles in Ukraine over the past month, according to South Korea.
• Their use could help Kim Jong Un boost his missile sales, an analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
• "This is the cash cow," said Toby Dalton, a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment.

Russia's use of North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine could boost missile sales for Kim Jong Un's government, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.

Last week, South Korea's ambassador to the UN accused North Korea of using Ukraine as a "test site" for its nuclear-capable missiles.

Joonkook Hwang said Russia had used them in attacks on December 30, January 2, and January 4.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said Russia had acquired "several dozen" ballistic missiles from North Korea and used them in two separate attacks.

The missiles' use could effectively make them more attractive to potential buyers and ramp up North Korea's missile sales, Toby Dalton, senior fellow and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, told the Journal.

"This is the cash cow," Dalton said, adding that now "North Korea will be able to command a premium for these systems in ways it wasn't before."

If the missiles work well in Ukraine, they could be especially interesting for Middle Eastern countries, according to Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations at King's College London.

Pardo told Business Insider that North Korea's position could be: "Look, we have good technology that, in a worst-case scenario, works well, and as we have shown, we're willing to transfer it."

In the 1980s, North Korea mostly exported arms to Middle Eastern countries, with sales to Iran accounting for 90% of exports, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

This is still the case, according to Bruce Bechtol, a professor of political science at Angelo State University in Texas and a frequent writer on North Korean arms trade. "Many of these arms go to proxies such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iranian militias," Bechtol told Middle East Eye last year.

But North Korea has also sent more than a million shells to Russia and is running its factories "at maximum capacity to meet Russia's demand for military supplies," South Korean lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum said in November, citing the country's Intelligence Service, per CNN.

Ukraine's prosecutor-general, Andriy Kostin, told state broadcaster Suspilne that a preliminary examination confirmed that a missile fired at Kharkiv on January 2 was developed in North Korea, per a translation provided by Meduza.

Even so, Pardo told BI last week that Russia's use of these missiles in Ukraine will provide the US, South Korea, and Japan with valuable information on their accuracy, range, launch failure rate, and Ukraine's ability to intercept them.

"If Ukraine, for example, proves more successful in shooting down North Korean missiles compared to Russian ones, then we can assume that North Korean technology is not as advanced," he said.