At the U.N. Security Council on Friday, a representative of Conflict Armament Research said his organization had detailed the components of the missiles used against Ukraine and says evidence shows they came from North Korea.
The President of Russia, Vladimir Putinit suggested resume production of intermediate range missiles. This was prohibited under a now-defunct treaty with the United States.
He Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) prohibited the use of nuclear and conventional land missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
It was considered a milestone in arms control when the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the American President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988. But The United States withdrew from the pact in 2019citing Russian violations.
Putin said that Russia had not produced such missiles since the treaty was scrapped in 2019, but that “today it is known that The United States not only produces these missile systemsbut now has brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. “It was recently announced that they are in the Philippines.”
Since withdrawing from the treaty, The US military has made progress in developing a conventional missile capabilitymedium-range, ground-launched aircraft called Typhon, which would have been prohibited under the INF.
The Typhon fires two Navy missiles, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile and the Standard Missile-6. The military They tested the system during an exercise in the Philippines this spring.
The last remaining arms control pact between Washington and Moscow is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treatywhat limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads y 700 missiles and bombers deployed. Expires in 2026and the lack of dialogue on a successor agreement has worried arms control advocates.
Putin’s remarks near Moscow came on the same day that arms transfers from North Korea to Russia were the focus of a UN Security Council session.
Jonah Leff, a representative of Conflict Armament Research (CAR), said his organization has detailed the components of the missiles used against Ukraine and claims that Tests show they come from North Korea.
“The aforementioned evidence that my organization observed and exhaustively documented firsthand irrefutably establishes that the missile fired at Kharkiv was indeed of North Korean origin. On a subsequent visit in which I myself traveled with a team to Ukraine to obtain further documentation. We observed other conventional weapons manufactured by the DPRK that had been seized on the front and that had not been previously observed on the battlefield in Ukraine,” he told the UNSC.
UN Security Council resolutions ban the transfer of weapons to Russia.
“In recent months, there have also been complaints of transfer of ballistic missiles and ammunition from the DPRK to the Russian Federation in violation of relevant Security Council resolutions,” said Izumi Nakamitsu, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.
