Key Takeaways
- Strategic depth. North Korean missiles give Russia greater volume and allow Moscow to preserve some of its more sophisticated weapons, turning the conflict into a competition in industrial attrition.
- A broader alignment. Moscow also relies on Iran for drones and on China for components and supply chains, while the West continues to struggle to address these actors as part of a broader strategic challenge.
- Saturation warfare. The large-scale employment of relatively inexpensive drones and missiles forces Ukraine to expend much scarcer and more expensive air-defense interceptors over time.
- The West’s industrial lag. Despite rising US production and new European initiatives such as FREYJA, the allies could face a critical shortage of interceptors over the next twelve to twenty-four months.
In July 2026, Russia reportedly had approximately fifty Kinzhal missiles and a similar number of North Korean KN-23, KN-24, and KN-30 ballistic missiles, while a North Korean unit deployed in Voronezh could potentially bring as many as 120 additional missiles. Is Russia’s growing reliance on North Korean systems a rational strategy designed to preserve its most sophisticated missiles, such as the Zircon or S-400 missiles modified for surface-to-surface use? Is Russia rebuilding a stockpile that could eventually threaten European interests?
The KN-23 gives Moscow three things: volume, diversification, and greater depth of stocks.
Russia’s growing reliance on North Korean missiles is certainly consistent with a rational strategy aimed at preserving some of its more sophisticated Russian systems. But that is not the main issue.
The arrival of additional North Korean missiles must be understood as part of a much broader phenomenon: Russia is no longer fighting this war solely with the resources of its own industrial base. It now benefits from forms of complementarity with North Korea, Iran, and China that provide it with additional industrial and strategic depth.
This matters because the war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a competition between two regeneration capacities: the ability of Russia and its partners to produce offensive systems, and the ability of Ukraine and its allies to manufacture the means to intercept them.
But we should first take a broader view. The delivery of additional missiles, which comes amid North Korea’s growing involvement alongside Russia, demonstrates that we remain far from a situation in which an end to the conflict can be taken for granted.
Neither economic sanctions, political declarations, nor European diplomatic posturing appear capable today of sustainably deterring a Russia that can rely on active support from partners that, beyond their individual interests, share a desire to challenge an international order dominated by Western powers.
Europe has so far struggled to grasp the global nature of this challenge. Europeans long remained focused primarily on Russia, as though the war in Ukraine were exclusively a European security problem. The United States, similarly, has sometimes treated the Russian threat, the Iranian threat, and strategic competition with China as separate issues.
Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate these theaters and actors from one another.
We can no longer simply consider Russia in one category, Iran in another, China somewhere else, and North Korea as a purely regional threat confined to Northeast Asia. We must begin thinking about how to confront a group of powers that, while not necessarily constituting a fully integrated alliance, are developing growing forms of strategic cooperation, collusion, and complementarity: Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, and Tehran.
This cooperation is already having very concrete effects on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Iran supplied Russia with Shahed drones early in the war. Those systems became a starting point for the development of a genuine Russian industrial capability in attack drones. Moscow did not simply import a capability: it gradually absorbed, adapted, and improved it in order to develop its own families of drones.
China, meanwhile, has played a critical role in the resilience of Russia’s economy and military-industrial base, particularly through supply chains involving electronic components, dual-use technologies, and broader economic flows that allow Russia to partially overcome its isolation.
Despite sanctions, Moscow has successfully redirected part of its economy and trade toward China and toward other countries less inclined to comply with the Western sanctions regime.
North Korea, however, occupies a particular place within this support architecture. It is not merely supplying weapons; it is directly contributing to Russia’s ability to sustain a war of attrition.
Pyongyang has reportedly delivered millions of artillery shells, multiple-launch rocket systems, KN-23 ballistic missiles, and other military equipment. For a more detailed examination of these developments, I would refer readers to my Hudson colleague Can Kasapoglu’s Ukraine Military Situation Report | July 29.
According to assessments cited by several intelligence sources, North Korean deliveries have become sufficiently significant to represent a substantial share of Russia’s artillery ammunition supply, with some Russian formations now heavily dependent on those stocks.
In a war in which the ability to manufacture, deliver, and fire thousands of artillery rounds every day remains a decisive factor, this support is anything but marginal. It directly contributes to Moscow’s ability to sustain its operational tempo.
North Korea’s involvement also goes beyond the delivery of weapons. It includes a direct human and military dimension that should not be underestimated.
North Korean troops have already been committed to operations, particularly in Russia’s Kursk region, where they took part in efforts to recapture territory occupied by Ukrainian forces. Volodymyr Zelensky has also warned that Moscow could receive as many as 30,000 additional North Korean troops. If such a deployment were confirmed, it would represent a considerable expansion of Pyongyang’s direct involvement in the war.
And the relationship works both ways.
Pyongyang provides Moscow with industrial depth. Moscow, in return, gives Pyongyang something equally valuable: real-world operational experience in modern warfare.
KN-23 missiles are being employed against actual Western air-defense systems. North Korean troops are gaining exposure to electronic warfare, FPV drones, and sensor-saturated battlefields.
The lessons North Korea draws from Ukraine may therefore directly affect the military balance on the Korean Peninsula in the future.
Missile Interception Works—but Sustaining It Is the Real Challenge
Ukraine has demonstrated that modern air defense can neutralize a significant share of the missiles and other systems launched against its territory.
Ballistic missile interception, however, presents a different challenge. Missile-defense systems have demonstrated genuine effectiveness, especially when integrated into a layered air-defense architecture. Patriot has shown that it can engage particularly complex ballistic threats.
But every successful engagement consumes a sophisticated and expensive interceptor available only in limited quantities.
In a war of attrition, repeated tactical victories can therefore eventually create strategic vulnerability if the adversary can manufacture offensive systems faster than the defender can replace its interceptors.
The central problem is therefore endurance.
Saturation warfare creates an extremely difficult equation. The attacker can launch relatively inexpensive missiles and drones in sufficient numbers to force the defender to expend much rarer and more expensive interceptors.
Recent conflicts in the Middle East have underscored precisely this constraint. The United States and Israel have had to mobilize considerable air- and missile-defense capabilities to protect their forces, territories, and partners.
This raises a fundamental industrial question: even when an interception is tactically successful, that success can progressively become a strategic problem unless sufficient stocks and production capacity exist to maintain the same tempo for weeks or months.
It is therefore imperative not only to replenish interceptor inventories, but to increase them on a sustained basis.
The Greater Challenge: Combining Drones and Ballistic Missiles
Intercepting a ballistic or cruise missile is an extraordinarily demanding mission, but it takes place within relatively mature air-defense architectures.
Drones create a different equation. They can be manufactured at relatively low cost, employed in large numbers, fly at low altitude, and be launched simultaneously from multiple locations. Their purpose does not necessarily lie in each individual drone destroying a target. Their collective value also comes from their ability to saturate defenses.
The challenge becomes even more complex when Russia combines effectors with very different costs, capabilities, and flight profiles.
The important question is therefore no longer simply how many drones Russia can manufacture, but whether it can store them, prepare them, launch them simultaneously, and integrate them into composite salvos combining drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles.
Medium- and long-range drones are reinforcing this trend by providing the ability to strike energy infrastructure, military installations, and urban centers at significant distances.
A more recent development suggests that Russia is now building the infrastructure required to generate repeated mass attacks: specialized facilities, storage capacity, expanding numbers of launch ramps, and the employment of multiple variants of the Geran family.
We are gradually seeing the emergence of genuine “droneports,” designed to sustain a high launch tempo and organize increasingly complex attacks.
This combination forces the defender to deal simultaneously with multiple categories of threats and to select the appropriate defensive effector for each one.
That is where a major economic and industrial problem arises. It is simply not sustainable to use an extremely expensive missile interceptor to destroy a much cheaper drone.
Air defense therefore requires a full spectrum of defensive systems adapted to different threat levels: short-range systems, guns, electronic warfare, interceptor drones, directed-energy systems, and sensor-network-based architectures.
The question is no longer simply whether one can shoot down a drone. It is whether one can neutralize hundreds or even thousands of different threats over a period of months without exhausting available stocks.
Moreover, a mass attack can place the entire defensive chain under pressure: detection, classification and identification, tracking, command and control, and finally the allocation of the right effector at the right moment.
The objective is therefore not simply to saturate interceptor inventories.
A defense system can be overwhelmed even before it has physically exhausted its missiles. If it faces too many targets simultaneously, its ability to process information and make the correct decisions becomes a critical constraint in its own right.
The real challenge is therefore the transition from missile defense to a defense architecture capable of absorbing mass.
Air defense can no longer be conceived solely as protecting a handful of strategic sites against a limited number of missiles. It must evolve toward an architecture capable of defending territory and critical infrastructure against repeated, distributed, and potentially massive attacks.
In the war of attrition now taking shape, the decisive question will not simply be which side possesses the best interceptor. It will be whether the attacker or defender can sustain its industrial, technological, and operational effort for longer.
That is precisely why European industrial strategy has become so important.
Europe simultaneously faces the Russian threat, the reconstruction and expansion of Moscow’s military capabilities, and the external support Russia receives, particularly from North Korea.
North Korea is not merely providing missiles and artillery shells. It is directly helping Russia sustain a war of attrition by meeting part of its requirements for ammunition and weapons.
European leaders are increasingly aware of the challenge. Europe now understands that it is no longer simply observing a war taking place on its borders. Russia is already conducting hybrid actions against European states, including cyberattacks, sabotage, influence operations, and other forms of pressure.
But one fundamental distinction must also be recognized: European Union countries are not currently engaged in a high-intensity war comparable to the one Ukraine is fighting. This is a point I emphasize in my report on European defense, Strategic Autonomy versus Operational Readiness.
The awareness is real, and it has translated into higher defense budgets.
Yet Europe continues to generate an abundance of declarations, ambitions, and reform pledges without converting them rapidly enough into industrial capacity.
Modern warfare now requires something different: volume, stockpiles, secure supply chains, and the ability to sustain production over time.
That is the real paradigm shift.
For decades, Western armed forces were structured around technological superiority and relatively limited-duration operations. The war in Ukraine has brutally returned us to the logic of attritional warfare.
This is no longer about conducting an air campaign for several days or weeks and then achieving the desired objectives. Armed forces must be able to maintain operational tempo for months—or even years.
That means producing missiles, interceptors, munitions, and drones in very large numbers.
This is one of the areas in which the gap between identified requirements and genuinely available industrial capacity remains especially worrying.
The European Union has embarked on a significant expansion of drone production capacity, with targets that could reach three to four million units by 2027. But the real question is whether those ambitions will actually be implemented.
There remains an enormous difference between announcing a political objective and being able to manufacture equipment in volume, at scale, and over time.
Producing one million—or several million—drones is no longer simply a budgetary decision. It requires industrial organization, supply chains, electronic components, manufacturing capacity, and coordination among European states.
And Europe remains far from achieving a genuine continent-wide industrial division of labor.
Each country still largely seeks to preserve its own capabilities, programs, and national industrial champions.
But a wartime economy requires a different logic: policymakers must identify what each country can manufacture rapidly, at scale, and sustainably, and then organize genuine complementarity among national industrial capacities.
At the level of the Atlantic Alliance, the challenge is greater still. If we think in terms of high-intensity warfare and saturation, requirements run into the millions.
We therefore need to move from relatively limited production toward genuine mass production, capable both of meeting battlefield requirements and continuously replenishing inventories.
We are still far from that point.
Does the expenditure of Patriot interceptors in Ukraine and the Middle East reveal a structural weakness in the Western defense industrial base, given the need to supply several theaters and several allies simultaneously? Or can the production increases announced by Lockheed Martin close this gap over the medium term?
The expenditure of Patriot missiles in Ukraine and the Middle East does reveal a broader structural weakness.
The United States and its allies now have to supply several theaters of operations and several partners simultaneously, while their industrial base was designed over several decades for an environment of relative peace—not for multiple wars of attrition occurring at the same time.
That assessment nevertheless requires some qualification.
US industry has begun a genuine production ramp-up. Lockheed Martin, which manufactures PAC-3 MSE interceptors used by the Patriot system, has significantly increased production in recent years.
After delivering approximately 620 missiles in 2025, the company now plans, under a multiyear agreement with the US government, to progressively expand its annual capacity to approximately 2,000 interceptors.
That is a major increase. But it will not immediately solve the stockpile problem because the United States must simultaneously rebuild its own inventories, meet Ukrainian requirements, support allies in the Middle East, and prepare for NATO and Indo-Pacific contingencies.
For Ukraine, the danger of an interceptor shortage over the next twelve to twenty-four months is therefore very real.
Kyiv has long called for some form of localized production or co-production of Patriot interceptors in order to reduce its dependence on external deliveries.
In July 2026, the United States announced its intention to grant Ukraine a license enabling participation in their production.
But a considerable distance remains between a political announcement and the establishment of an actual industrial capability: technology transfer, facility security, financing, access to components, and the extent to which production can genuinely be localized all remain open questions.
Could European powers be overtaken by Russia if Moscow produces more offensive systems and replenishes its stocks through its partners, allowing it to saturate Ukrainian defenses and eventually threaten NATO countries?
Europe is beginning to seek an industrial answer to the growing pressure on interceptor inventories.
The FREYJA program, launched in July 2026 by a coalition of ten European countries including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine, is particularly interesting in this regard.
Its ambition is not simply to provide more missiles. It seeks to develop an integrated European ballistic missile-defense capability based on an open architecture that combines Ukrainian operational experience with technologies from several European defense companies.
Ukraine is expected to contribute the interceptor missile and launcher, while different European partners work on radars, sensors, guidance, and command-and-control systems.
The program reflects an important change in logic. Europe is beginning to understand that its missile defense cannot indefinitely depend on a limited number of US systems and highly complex interceptors whose production remains constrained.
But although the objective is extraordinarily ambitious—with a first prototype planned for the first half of 2027—the system is not expected to conduct its first interception until around mid-2027.
We therefore have to remain cautious. FREYJA does not provide an immediate answer to the existing shortage of Patriot interceptors.
And that is precisely the challenge.
In a war of attrition, industrial expansion takes time, while battlefield requirements are immediate.
A sophisticated weapon is no longer sufficient if it cannot be manufactured and replaced at the necessary scale.
Ukraine has demonstrated that military power now depends as much on the ability to innovate as on the ability to manufacture, replenish inventories, and endure.
For Europe, the challenge therefore goes far beyond weapons production.
It requires building genuine industrial depth across the entire ecosystem necessary to support defense: electronic components, semiconductors, critical materials, energy, software, and artificial intelligence.
European dependencies in many of these sectors constitute potential vulnerabilities in a prolonged confrontation.
Significant additional effort is also required in the technologies that will shape future conflict: autonomous systems, embedded AI, drones capable of operating in contested environments, swarms, and low-cost interception systems.
The issue is therefore not simply to produce more systems, but to field systems sufficiently adaptable to evolve at the same rapid pace as battlefield innovation.
Ultimately, part of the strategic balance between Russia and its partners and the West will be determined by this industrial competition.
Moscow can draw on its own manufacturing capacity, on shells and missiles supplied by North Korea, and on external supply chains and cooperation, particularly with China.
Faced with this expanded industrial depth, Europe will have to organize its own capabilities at both the European and allied levels.
Is Russia’s growing use of North Korean missiles evidence of a rational attrition strategy designed to preserve its most sophisticated Russian missiles?
Yes, at least in part.
Russia’s increasing use of North Korean weaponry can certainly be understood as part of a rational approach to attrition management. But it should not be interpreted solely as an attempt to preserve Moscow’s most sophisticated missiles.
Russia is fighting a long war and must manage several priorities simultaneously: maintaining a high strike tempo, rebuilding its own stocks, preserving certain rarer or more sophisticated capabilities, and above all retaining sufficient capacity to respond to a potential expansion of the conflict.
From the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russia had to adapt its military model to a conflict that proved far longer and more costly than it had originally anticipated.
We have seen older and sometimes supposedly obsolete equipment return to the battlefield. This was not necessarily the result of an initial decision to preserve modern equipment in reserve. It also reflects the enormous losses suffered by Russian forces and the need to mobilize every available resource.
Over time, however, Moscow has progressively developed a genuine economy of attrition: use whatever can be produced or supplied in mass quantities while reserving scarcer capabilities for those missions in which they are most necessary.
The same logic can apply to missiles.
A North Korean ballistic missile does not necessarily replace a more sophisticated Russian system. Instead, it adds another capability to Russia’s arsenal.
Moscow can consequently increase the number of strikes, diversify trajectories and threat profiles, and force Ukrainian air defenses to expend more interceptor missiles.
That is the essence of saturation warfare: the objective is not simply to destroy a target, but also to force the adversary to consume its defensive resources.
We also need to account for uncertainty over the duration of the war.
If Moscow concludes that the conflict will continue and that a long war works in its favor because of political, economic, and industrial fatigue within Western societies, its strategy will necessarily differ from that of an army seeking a rapid and decisive victory.
Under such circumstances, the depth of stockpiles becomes a fundamental strategic variable. A military must be able to endure, produce, replenish, and retain reserves for future contingencies.
At present, there has been no decisive strategic breakthrough. The front lines move, sometimes producing local territorial gains, but neither side has achieved a major operational rupture.
Under these conditions, maintaining sustained pressure becomes almost as important as achieving tactical victories.
There has, however, been an important development in recent months: Ukraine has acquired an increasing capacity to conduct deep strikes against Russian territory and against some of Russia’s strategic infrastructure.
That is progressively changing Moscow’s calculations.
Russia must now simultaneously sustain offensive operations in Ukraine and protect its own territory, energy infrastructure, industrial facilities, and military installations.
In a protracted war, Moscow therefore has to manage its resources across several fronts and for several missions at the same time.
This is precisely what makes North Korean assistance so important.
Pyongyang enables Moscow to expand the depth of its inventories and acquire additional capabilities without placing the entire burden on Russia’s own industrial production.
But the relationship is obviously not altruistic.
For North Korea, the war represents a source of revenue, a demonstration of its industrial and military capabilities, and an operational laboratory.
By supplying missiles for use in a real conflict, Pyongyang can also observe their performance, their reliability, and potentially the responses of opposing air-defense systems.
It also sends a strategic signal to the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
North Korea is demonstrating that it can not only develop ballistic capabilities, but manufacture them and supply them to a partner engaged in high-intensity warfare.
It is thus showing that it is no longer simply an isolated regional actor, but can participate in a much broader architecture of military cooperation.
If Russia continues to diversify its offensive systems through North Korea while Western interceptor inventories remain constrained, should Ukraine and NATO be concerned? Can Russia manufacture enough systems to saturate Ukrainian defenses faster than the West can manufacture the interceptors required to stop them? What should we expect for Ukraine—and for the credibility of NATO missile defense—over the next twelve to twenty-four months?
Yes, there is reason for concern. But it is important to understand the nature of the problem.
The question is not simply whether Russia possesses more missiles or whether Western systems can intercept them.
The central issue is endurance: Can Russia sustain a sufficiently high launch rate to force Ukraine and its allies to consume interceptors faster than they can manufacture them and replenish their stocks?
That is precisely the logic Moscow appears to be attempting to exploit.
Russia has an increasing ability to combine very different systems—drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles—in order to saturate and complicate Ukrainian defenses.
Not every weapon has to reach its target.
Some drones can be employed to distract or saturate the defense, while more sophisticated missiles exploit the openings created by that pressure.
This strategy forces Ukraine to make continuous choices.
No air-defense system can simultaneously protect an entire country as large as Ukraine.
Defenders therefore have to prioritize among major cities, energy infrastructure, military installations, and industrial capacity.
The more pressure there is on interceptor stocks, the more difficult those tradeoffs become.
North Korean assistance is especially significant in this regard.
It does not mean that Pyongyang’s missiles replace Russia’s most sophisticated systems. But they give Moscow additional depth: more systems available for launch, a greater ability to maintain pressure, and greater flexibility in managing its own stocks over time.
This comes on top of the other forms of external assistance Russia receives, particularly within its supply chains.
Over the next twelve to twenty-four months, the greater danger is therefore not necessarily a sudden collapse of Ukrainian air defenses, but rather a progressive deterioration of Ukraine’s defensive environment.
If Russia succeeds in maintaining a high strike tempo, Ukraine may increasingly have to concentrate its defenses around the most critical areas, leaving other infrastructure and territory more exposed.
This is also why Kyiv is seeking to establish production and maintenance capabilities closer to the theater.
The issue is no longer simply receiving Western systems. Ukraine must secure long-term access to the interceptors and supporting capabilities required to operate them.
European initiatives such as FREYJA are interesting in this regard, but they do not provide an immediate solution. There is an unavoidable gap between launching a program and achieving operational availability at scale—and that delay remains particularly problematic during an ongoing war.
For NATO, the implications are also significant.
This should not be interpreted as evidence that Western systems are ineffective. On the contrary, Patriot and other air-defense architectures have demonstrated an ability to intercept extraordinarily complex threats.
Israel’s experience also demonstrates the value of an integrated, layered air-defense system that combines different capabilities according to the range, nature, and profile of the threat: Iron Dome for shorter-range threats, but also David’s Sling and Arrow against more complex and longer-range threats.
Such an architecture makes it possible to match the interceptor to the threat and, as far as possible, avoid expending the most expensive systems against less sophisticated targets.
But even an effective layered architecture remains dependent on interceptor availability and on the ability to sustain a prolonged effort.
The fundamental challenge is therefore one of scale and simultaneity.
The United States and its allies must rebuild their own inventories while simultaneously supporting Ukraine and retaining sufficient capabilities for other theaters, particularly the Middle East and Indo-Pacific.
The credibility of NATO’s defense will therefore depend as much on the technical performance of its systems as on the depth of its inventories and the industrial capacity to replenish them.
This is where the competition with Russia assumes a broader dimension.
Moscow no longer depends solely on its own industrial base. It can also draw on the capabilities and resources of its partners, including North Korea for ammunition and certain missile systems.
The real competition now underway is therefore a race of production rates.
Will Russia and its partners be able to maintain or expand their volume of offensive systems faster than Ukraine and the West can manufacture the systems required to intercept them?
It would be premature to conclude that Moscow has already won that race.
The United States—particularly through Lockheed Martin’s planned increase in production—and European countries are beginning to adapt their industrial bases.
But the risk is real: in a war of attrition, technological superiority is no longer sufficient. States must also possess enough systems and interceptors to endure over time.
That is one of the central lessons of the war in Ukraine.
Beyond the growing role of drones on the battlefield, we are witnessing a confrontation between industrial models—and between their respective abilities to sustain a prolonged military effort.
Against Russian capabilities reinforced by North Korean supplies and external supply chains, Europe must rebuild its own industrial depth and reduce its vulnerabilities.
The challenge concerns not only the manufacture of weapons, but also supply-chain resilience and access to components, energy, and critical technologies.
The United States itself has begun rethinking how to rebuild its defense industrial base in a strategic environment in which it may need to support several theaters simultaneously.
This echoes the World War II concept of the “arsenal of democracy”: mobilizing a sufficiently broad civilian industrial base in support of the armed forces to sustain a prolonged military effort and accelerate delivery rates.
Ultimately, the tactical complexity we are seeing today—the combination of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles—serves a much broader strategic purpose: to saturate defenses and exploit an adversary’s vulnerabilities.
But behind the contest between offensive systems and interceptors lies a more fundamental competition:
the competition between industrial strategies to produce, replenish stockpiles, and, above all, outlast the adversary.