North Korea's army fired attack drones, tactical cruise missiles, short-range ballistic missiles and large-calibre thermobaric rockets at a single target on 12 September, the first time state media has described drones and missiles used together in one strike exercise. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff detected several short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Wonsan area at about 5.20am that flew about 250 kilometres before falling into the sea. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the drill two days later and said all systems achieved "100 percent accuracy" while "ensuring the unity and simultaneity of firepower attack".
Yu Chang-son, director of the Artillery Bureau of the Korean People's Army General Staff, said the exercise improved the military's ability to destroy opposing forces "organizationally and structurally once an order is given", according to KCNA. Subunits from five artillery and missile joint units took part under Marshal Pak Jong-chon, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. Kim Jong Un did not attend. The target was an island in the sea off Wonsan, USNI News reported.
AeroTime, an aviation trade outlet, wrote that the four weapon types fly on different profiles: drones slow and low, cruise missiles on controlled low paths, ballistic missiles on steep climbs and fast descents and rocket artillery over shorter ranges. Each presents "a different radar signature, trajectory and engagement window", AeroTime wrote. The Korea Herald reported that analysts saw evidence of an "integrated firepower control system" in the drill. US Indo-Pacific Command said the launches posed no immediate threat to US personnel, territory or allies.
Freedom Edge 26, a naval and air exercise by the United States, South Korea and Japan, was ending as the drill took place. North Korea had condemned the trilateral exercise in advance.
Hypersonic launches on 20 September
Kim oversaw the launch of two missiles from Anbyon County near Wonsan at 3pm and 5.50pm on 20 September. KCNA identified the weapon as the Hwasongpho-11Ma-1, an upgraded version of the Hwasong-11Ma hypersonic missile first shown as a mock-up at the Defence Development-2025 exhibition in October 2025. South Korea's Joint Chiefs said the first missile flew about 450 kilometres and the second more than 600 kilometres. Japan's defence ministry put the flights at 440 kilometres with an apogee of 60 kilometres and 590 kilometres with an apogee of 70 kilometres. North Korean graphics claimed a range of 908 kilometres, The War Zone reported.
State media quoted Kim as saying the missile was an "irresistible force" and an "incurable headache" for adversaries that represented "ultramodern" technology. His daughter Kim Ju Ae attended. The Hwasong-11Ma pairs a wedge-shaped glide vehicle with a booster from the Hwasong-11 family, known in the West as the KN-23, and the new version uses a six-axle launch vehicle in place of the earlier five-axle design, The War Zone reported. Missiles of this class fly at least five times the speed of sound and can change direction in flight.
Hong Sung-pyo of the Korea Institute for Military Affairs said: "Because it manoeuvres as it descends during the terminal phase of flight, it is harder to track and intercept than a conventional ballistic missile." Yang Moo-jin, former president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the weapon was "designed to strike key military facilities across the Korean peninsula within an extremely short period of time". Shinjiro Koizumi, Japan's defence minister, said North Korea's missile development "violates relevant Security Council resolutions, and is absolutely unacceptable".
Guided 240mm rockets on 22 September
North Korea test-fired upgraded shells for its 240mm multiple rocket launcher on 22 September, and KCNA reported the test on 24 September. The rockets carry an "autonomous pinpoint guide system" and can reach 100 kilometres on a ballistic trajectory and 115 kilometres in a combined glide mode, KCNA said. South Korea's military detected several rounds fired towards the West Sea.
Pak Jong-chon said the army must "concentrate the deadliest and destructive attack forces on the southern border" and replace all long-range strike weapons with "the latest ones at the earliest date". The test belongs to a five-year plan to modernise artillery and missile forces. Kim told the Ninth Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea, which closed on 25 February, that the country would build more powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles, anti-satellite weapons and artificially intelligent unmanned attack systems.
Air defence arithmetic
Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Wall Street Journal that salvo attacks mixing cheap and expensive weapons can overwhelm an opponent with sophisticated defences. "It changes the air defense arithmetic pretty substantially," Panda said. Coordinating weapons that travel at very different speeds demands integrated command systems, and North Korea lacks up-to-date hardware across much of its military.
Benjamin Jensen and Tobias Oestreich of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote on 31 August that Russia is on track to launch 840 ballistic missiles at Ukraine in 2026, 47 per cent more than in 2025, and that the total could approach 1,000 with extra North Korean shipments. Ukraine's ballistic missile interception rate fell from 24 per cent in 2025 to 10.2 per cent in 2026 as its stocks of Patriot and IRIS-T interceptors shrank, they wrote. "Large salvos of missiles and drones define modern war," Jensen and Oestreich wrote. A war involving China or North Korea would put still heavier pressure on US and allied interceptor stocks, they wrote, adding that China has raised ballistic missile production by 140 per cent.
Lami Kim, Korea chair at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told the Wall Street Journal that drones added to North Korea's missile fire could drain South Korea's air defences and improve the odds for follow-up strikes with heavier weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons. "North Korea's growing drone capabilities, when combined with its nuclear and missile capabilities, could alter the military balance on the Korean Peninsula," she said.
Iran's cluster warheads
Iran has fired waves of Shahed drones alongside ballistic and other missiles since the United States and Israel went to war with it on 28 February, forcing the US and its regional partners to spend costly interceptors. The first confirmed Iranian cluster-warhead strike hit Or Yehuda in Israel on 4 March, and submunitions from a single missile landed at sites up to 13 kilometres apart, according to a Wikipedia compilation of Human Rights Watch findings and Israeli reports. At least nine people were killed in verified cluster strikes between 4 and 28 March.
Fabian Hinz, who studies Iranian missiles at Conflict Armament Research, told the Wall Street Journal: "You create this large number of potential targets in the form of submunitions, and then at the same time you fire your conventional ballistic missiles in the hope to overwhelm the enemy air defenses or missile defenses." The Jerusalem Post reported on 25 September that President Donald Trump had rejected an Iranian ceasefire proposal.
Missiles tested in Ukraine
Russia had received about 250 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles from North Korea by September 2025, 38 North reported in August. Ukrainian military sources said the KN-23's miss distance fell from between 1,000 and 3,000 metres in early 2024 to between 50 and 100 metres by February 2025. 38 North wrote that North Korea deployed its own missile launch unit to Russia from November 2023 to December 2025 and "has used its access to information about Russia's use of the KN-23" to improve the missile's performance and production.
Vladimir Putin and Kim signed a mutual defence treaty in Pyongyang in June 2024, and North Korea sent an estimated 15,000 troops to Russia later that year. Pyongyang has not said how many have come home. Kim opened a memorial with hundreds of graves for soldiers killed in the war in Pyongyang in March.
Workers inside Russia
Sanctions monitors from 11 governments in the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT), including the United States, South Korea, Japan, Britain and Canada, said on 16 September that North Korean labourers "are manufacturing military drones for Russia on Russian soil". The group estimated that 15,000 to 30,000 North Koreans were working in Russia at the end of 2025 and that between 35,600 and 101,280 were deployed abroad in total. The workers generated between $450 million and $800 million for the government in 2025, and the state confiscates 80 to 90 per cent of their wages, the monitors said. A worker in Russia earns about $7,500 a year, up to five times the pay in China.
Bloomberg and the Kyiv Post reported the MSMT findings as showing up to 25,000 North Koreans assembling Iranian-designed drones, centred on the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, where Russia builds its versions of the Shahed. The joint statement published by the Canadian government does not give a figure for drone workers. Russia "created a student visa scheme to camouflage North Korean labourers", the statement said. Russian consular data show 36,413 visas issued to North Koreans in 2025, of which 35,839 were for education, against 9,239 in 2024, NK News reported. United Nations Security Council resolutions have banned North Korean workers from earning income abroad since 2017.
Wildberries warehouses under Ukrainian fire
Ukrainian long-range drones struck more than 20 warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer, from 18 July into mid-August. South Korean officials who viewed videos from one of the struck sites told the Wall Street Journal it had employed North Korean women. Russian authorities said the strikes killed at least nine people and did not give the victims' nationalities. The Elektrostal warehouse in Moscow region, where videos showing North Korean workers in purple Wildberries uniforms circulated in April 2025, was among the first sites hit on 18 July, with one person killed and 37 injured, according to Russian reports compiled by Wikipedia. The Wall Street Journal did not identify which warehouse employed the women.
Tatyana Kim, chief executive of Wildberries, said: "Terrorist attacks on our warehouses are force majeure circumstances." In August a Russian job site advertised for Korean-language interpreters at Wildberries warehouses. Wildberries did not respond to the Wall Street Journal's request for comment.
Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, told the Wall Street Journal: "Kim's major concern isn't North Korean workers getting killed. His motivations are financial." Ward said Pyongyang, which has long supplied men to Russian building sites, is now sending more women to widen its income.
Russia's Labour Ministry says the country will need nearly 11 million new workers by 2030. Migrants from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, long a source of cheap labour, have been moving elsewhere after a wartime rise in Russian nationalism and cases of migrants being pressed into military service.
Alisa Svitova, a 21-year-old student who worked this year as an interpreter for North Korean labourers at Russian agricultural plants, told the Wall Street Journal that the workers live in dormitories beside the plants and arrive in groups with a director, cook, interpreter, doctor and foreman. "When it comes to their work in Russia, many think that they are helping Russia and promoting the friendship between the two nations," she said.
Managers post requests for North Korean workers almost daily in a Telegram chat operated by MMC Personnel, a Russian agency that supplies foreign labour. The managing director of one of Russia's largest seafood and caviar plants posted a notice in September for 30 North Korean women and told the Wall Street Journal his company trains them with animated videos subtitled in Korean. A Moscow labour agency advertised a team of 40 North Korean women in August as cooks, conveyor-line operators or textile workers at about $1,800 a month. South Korea's National Intelligence Service says North Korean soldiers in Russia earn about $2,000 a month.
Chris Monday, an associate professor at Dongseo University in South Korea, told the Wall Street Journal: "It's good money for Kim Jong Un. For the workers, it's an opportunity to get out of North Korea."
North Korean dancers performed in late July at a meat-processing plant near a military air base in Moscow region, at a concert marking the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Officials from United Russia, the ruling party, posted videos showing dozens of North Korean women in the audience, who they said were training at the plant.
Road bridge and diplomacy
Russia and North Korea opened their first road bridge on 7 September, a two-lane crossing of about one kilometre over the Tumen River between Khasan in Primorye and Rason. The Russian checkpoint is designed for 300 vehicles a day. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and North Korean Premier Pak Thae Song joined the ceremony by video. The bridge is named after Yakov Novichenko, the Soviet officer credited with shielding Kim Il Sung from a grenade in Pyongyang in 1946.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung told the UN General Assembly on 23 September: "I hope the long-suspended dialogue between North Korea and the US can resume without delay." Lee proposed halting North Korea's nuclear and missile advances first, then reducing them in the medium term and finally reaching a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons. Kim told the party congress in February that North Korea saw no reason it could not get along with the United States if Washington dropped its policy of confrontation, KCNA reported, and he said Seoul's government was "clumsily deceptive". Trump has sought a meeting with Kim around the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in November.
