North Korean weapons are killing Ukrainians. The implications are far bigger

On 2 January, a young Ukrainian weapons inspector, Khrystyna Kimachuk, got word that an unusual-looking missile had crashed into a building in the city of Kharkiv. She began calling her contacts in the Ukrainian military, desperate to get her hands on it. Within a week, she had the mangled debris splayed out in front of her at a secure location in the capital Kyiv.

She began taking it apart and photographing every piece, including the screws and computer chips smaller than her fingernails. She could tell almost immediately this was not a Russian missile, but her challenge was to prove it.

Buried amidst the mess of metal and spouting wires, Ms Kimachuk spotted a tiny character from the Korean alphabet. Then she came across a more telling detail. The number 112 had been stamped onto parts of the shell. This corresponds to the year 2023 in the North Korean calendar. She realised she was looking at the first piece of hard evidence that North Korean weapons were being used to attack her country.

"We'd heard they had delivered some weapons to Russia, but I could see it, touch it, investigate it, in a way no-one had been able to do before. This was very exciting", she told me over the phone from Kyiv.

Since then, the Ukrainian military says dozens of North Korean missiles have been fired by Russia into its territory. They have killed at least 24 people and injured more than 70.

For all the recent talk of Kim Jong Un preparing to start a nuclear war, the more immediate threat is now North Korea's ability to fuel existing wars and feed global instability.