The dead in Zaporizhzhia were steelworkers, all of them workers at the Zaporizhstal steelworks, which closed after the attack. At least six were killed and more than a dozen wounded in the overnight strike, and Volodymyr Zelensky has said what killed them: ballistic missiles from North Korea, fired by Russia. The plant’s workers went to work on the morning shift as usual, and the missiles that ended their shift came from a country thousands of miles away that has no quarrel with Ukraine and is paid in Russian cash and favors.
Zelensky made the accusation in his evening address, saying that for the first time Russia cannot wage war without reinforcements from North Korea. He went further: every North Korean strike against Ukraine, he argued, lets Pyongyang’s weapons correct their shortcomings and blind spots, and that is a danger not just to Ukraine but to the rest of the world. It is a serious claim, and the BBC, which reported it, noted that no evidence was presented alongside it. It is also not a new claim: Ukrainian and Western officials, including American intelligence, have said for years that Russia has used North Korean missiles in this war. What is new is the president saying it in wartime as a statement of dependence, not of fact-finding.
A war that runs on other people’s weapons
The numbers behind the accusation are stark. Ukraine’s military says Pyongyang-made missiles have struck its territory dozens of times since the full-scale invasion began. North Korean soldiers, roughly 11,000 of them, fought alongside Russian units to drive Ukrainian forces from Kursk after the August 2024 incursion, and Western officials estimated in early 2025 that they suffered casualties approaching 40 percent in three months of fighting there. Over the weekend Zelensky warned that as many as 50,000 North Korean troops may be on their way to the front. The picture is of a Russian army that has burned through its own arsenal and its own manpower and now fights on Pyongyang’s production lines and Pyongyang’s conscription lists.
The overnight exchange showed the strain on both sides. Ukraine’s air force reported 120 drones fired at the country, plus a range of different missiles, but for the first time it did not say how many missiles were fired or intercepted. The silence was deliberate, and it followed an air force statement urging the media not to write sensationalized headlines or spread pessimism about the shortage of air defense interceptors. A country that used to publish its interception counts every morning has stopped counting, which tells its own story about the state of its air defenses after five years of war.
The other half of the exchange
The attack on Zaporizhzhia was one half of a night of mutual destruction. In Kyiv, sirens sounded twice, one person was injured, and a hospital was damaged, with staff and patients sheltering. In Sumy, two women were wounded by a drone, and a third person was killed by gliding bombs later in the day. Strikes on substations in Kherson and Kharkiv cut power. In Russia, Ukrainian drones hit warehouses of Wildberries, the country’s largest online retailer, in the Voronezh region, the latest in a series of strikes on a company Kyiv says supplies the Russian army. The day before, Ukrainian drones had killed at least 13 people in Tatarstan, more than 1,100 kilometers from the border, in what officials called among the worst single attacks on Russian territory since the war began; seven of the dead were citizens of Uzbekistan, and the target was an oil refinery.
Zelensky used the address to celebrate the deep strikes into Russia, calling the hit on a petrochemical plant in western Siberia a very significant achievement and promising more. The two wars inside one war are visible in that sentence: Ukraine striking Russian refineries a thousand miles from the front, Russia striking Ukrainian cities with weapons bought from a third country’s arsenal. Neither side can end the exchange, and both are reaching deeper into their inventories and their alliances to keep it going.
The Zaporizhzhia strike matters for what it says about the shape of the war in its fifth year. A Russian army that once boasted of its own missile production is now firing weapons made in North Korea at a Ukrainian steel plant, while Ukrainian drones fly to Siberia. The weapons are imported, the casualties are imported, the war itself has become an import-dependent enterprise on both sides. Zelensky’s charge, whether or not the evidence is made public this week, describes a reality the flight data already shows: Russia’s war runs increasingly on Pyongyang’s production lines, and the steelworkers of Zaporizhzhia are among the people paying for it.
Sources: BBC, The Guardian, Euronews, Kyiv Independent