Kiev: Ukraine’s space agency said on Wednesday that an engine type reportedly used in North Korean missiles was made at a Ukrainian factory, but solely for use in space rockets supplied to Russia.
The development came after an expert report published on Thursday said Pyongyang’s recent rapid progress in developing a long-range missile appeared to have come after it refurbished rocket engines procured from a plant in the former Soviet Union. These could have been bought from corrupt workers at arsenals in Russia or Ukraine and smuggled to North Korea by criminal networks at some point between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Ukraine’s current crisis, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said.
“Such engines were made up to 2001 by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash (plant),” Ukraine’s acting space agency chief Yuriy Radchenko told journalists. He said the RD-250 engines were used in Cyclone-2 and Cyclone-3 space rockets supplied to Russia. Both the engines and the space carrier rockets “were made at Yuzhmash in the interests of Russia,” Mr Radchenko said. In total, 233 such rockets were produced, used in space launches.
The space agency chief said that according to Ukrainian information, “Russia today has between 7 and 20” of the Cyclone rockets and could do whatever it wanted with the engines and blueprints.
“They have these engines, they have the documentation. They can supply these engines from the finished rockets to whoever they want.”
The IISS report suggests Kim Jong-Un’s regime, which successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, has abandoned attempts to modify the Russian-built OKB-456 rocket engine and has now switched to the once Ukrainian-made RD-250.
During the Soviet era, the RD-250 was produced at the Yuzhmash plant in Dnipro, a city that is today in Kiev government-held central Ukraine, 150km from an active frontline held by Russian-backed separatists. Ukraine did not act as a supplier of the engines to any other country, Mr Radchenko said.
Meanwhile, North Korea likely has the ability to produce its own missile engines and intelligence suggests it does not need to rely on imports, US Intelligence officials said on Tuesday.
The assessment disputes a new study by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies that said that theengines for a nuclear missile North Korea is developing to hitthe United States likely were made in factories in Ukraine or Russia and probably obtained via black market networks.
The New York Times cited the study on Monday. The newspaper’s report said that classified assessments by US Intelligence agencies mirrored the IISS finding.
“We have intelligence to suggest that North Korea is not reliant on imports of engines,” one US Intelligence official said. “Instead, we judge they have the ability to produce the engines themselves.”
He did not disclose any details of what underpinned the assessment on the high-performance liquid-fueledengines, called RD-250’s.
