The artillery shells that North Korea may give to Russia after Vladimir Putin’s planned meeting with Kim Jong Un in the near future are outdated and very imprecise, said Reuters. He adds that the Kremlin’s interest in these weapons proves that the Russians focus even more on quantity, not quality.
On Tuesday morning, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un arrived by armored train at the station in Ussuriysk in the Russian Far East. Kim will probably meet Putin in Vladivostok in the near future. As Western analysts and journalists assume, the topic of talks will be deliveries to Russia North Korean weapons, mainly artillery shells.
Kim Jong Un in conversation with Russian officialsReuters
Quantity, not quality
If Moscow does receive these munitions, it could help it replenish its dwindling supplies, but Pyongyang’s support is unlikely to affect the course of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. This will probably result not in a qualitative change on the front, but in an extension of the duration of the war, said Joseph Dempsey from the British International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in an interview with Reuters.
The Ukrainian army has precision artillery ammunition at its disposal, including: American Excalibur missiles, which can hit a three-meter target from a distance of up to 40 km. Against this background, North Korean weapons appear to be downright archaic, as evidenced by the incident in 2010, when the North Korean army fired on Yeonpyeong Island, which belongs to South Korea. According to estimates by American experts, more than half of the 170 artillery shells landed in the sea, and about 20 percent those that hit the island did not explode – recalled Reuters. As added, the probable cause of this state of affairs were either production defects or improper ammunition storage conditions.
North Korean artillery shellsKCNA
“Taking into account the very large number of missiles (given to Russia by North Korea – ed.), the lack of precision and occasional misfires would not be of much importance to the Russians. The problem would arise if this ammunition turned out to be of such poor quality that it would become dangerous even for Russian soldiers. There are indications that such situations are possible in the case of North Korean weapons,” admitted Siemon Wezeman from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Main photo source: KCNA