UN confirms that at least one North Korean missile has already landed in Ukraine, which represents a violation of the embargo on Pyongyang

The wreckage of a missile that crashed in Kharkiv in early January has been identified as belonging to a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile. The revelation was presented by the United Nations sanctions monitoring team to a Security Council committee. The 32-page report prepared by the UN was consulted by Reuters and finds that the debris is evidence of violation of the arms embargo applied to North Korea.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been under UN sanctions over its ballistic missile and nuclear programs since 2006, measures that have been tightened over the years.

The team monitoring compliance with sanctions traveled to Ukraine earlier this month and reported finding no evidence that the missile was manufactured by Russia. However, experts “were unable to independently identify where the missile was launched, nor by whom”. They had to resort to “information on the trajectory provided by the Ukrainian authorities, which indicates that it was launched from within the territory of the Russian Federation”, can be read in the report addressed to the UN Security Council sanctions committee on North Korea . The UN envoys also recalled that the Hwasong-11 missiles were publicly tested, for the first time, by Pyongyang in 2019.