North Korean-made ballistic missiles killed six people and wounded at least 19 others in a Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, a day before Pyongyang test-fired its own missile off Korea’s east coast for the second time in a week. The near-simultaneous events reflect how North Korean weapons are now factoring into two separate conflicts at once, even as Moscow has not confirmed using Pyongyang-supplied missiles in the attack and North Korea has not commented on either the strike or the deaths.
Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram that Zaporizhzhia was struck with North Korean ballistic missiles alongside Russia’s Zircon anti-ship missiles and precision-guided aerial bombs, calling it an attack calculated to inflict maximum damage on civilian infrastructure. Regional governor Ivan Fedorov posted images showing buildings and vehicles ablaze; casualty figures varied slightly across accounts, with some putting the wounded as high as 20.
Russia’s defense ministry confirmed strikes on Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv, saying its forces hit a metallurgical plant it described as supplying the Ukrainian military and a Kyiv logistics complex used to store drone components, but did not address the North Korean missile claim. Zelenskyy separately warned this week that Russia was preparing to station an additional 30,000 to 50,000 North Korean troops on its territory, without detailing how he arrived at that estimate, and said Russian forces could no longer sustain the war without North Korean supplies. Pyongyang and Moscow signed a mutual defense pact in June 2024, and North Korean troops previously helped Russia repel Ukrainian forces from the border Kursk region.
On the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea fired a ballistic missile from the eastern coastal Wonsan area around 6 a.m. Wednesday that traveled more than 700 kilometers before falling into the sea.
Japan’s Defense Ministry also detected the launch, saying the weapon landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. South Korean authorities said they had not yet completed a detailed analysis of the missile’s specifications. It marked North Korea’s 11th suspected ballistic missile test of the year and its second in six days, following an August 6 launch from the same area that Pyongyang never acknowledged in state media — an omission a Seoul-based analyst said suggested that earlier test may have failed to meet its objective. Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea specialist at Kyungnam University, said Pyongyang has rarely let a South Korea-U.S. joint exercise pass without some form of response, framing this week’s tests as consistent with that pattern rather than a departure from it.
South Korea’s National Security Council labeled the launches “acts of provocation” and called on Pyongyang to halt them immediately, while the country’s military said it remained ready to repel any provocation in coordination with the United States. Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said Tokyo had lodged a formal protest through diplomatic channels in Beijing, calling the launch “a serious problem that affects the safety of the Japanese people.”
Both launches came days ahead of Ulchi Freedom Shield, the annual joint military exercise between South Korea and the United States set to run from August 17 to August 27 and involve roughly 18,000 South Korean troops alongside American forces drawn from the approximately 28,500 U.S. personnel stationed in the country.
North Korea has for years denounced the drills as rehearsal for an invasion, while Washington and Seoul maintain the training is defensive. After last year’s exercises began, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the drills demonstrated the allies’ “will to ignite a war” and had grown more provocative than in previous years, vowing “proactive and overwhelming” countermeasures from Pyongyang in response.
This year’s iteration of the drills carries an added dimension tied directly to the war in Ukraine. Colonel Ryan Donald, spokesman for the U.S. and South Korean Combined Forces Command, said commanders were incorporating lessons drawn from North Korean troops’ battlefield experience fighting alongside Russian forces. “North Korean soldiers have taken those lessons they learned there and brought them back to North Korea. Our training accounts for that threat,” Donald said Monday.
The overlapping timelines mean the same North Korean weapons and personnel reshaping the battlefield in eastern Ukraine are now also shaping how the U.S. and South Korea plan to counter Pyongyang closer to home, a connection that has grown more concrete as the Ukraine war has stretched into its fifth year without resolution.
