The US mocked Russia for its motley cast of allies in Ukraine. It's not laughing any more.

Given that neither Russia nor North Korea has admitted to arms transfers, there is no way of knowing exactly how significant their contribution is to Russia's wider supply of munitions for the war. But "the volume of stuff that's been going over is huge. It's significant," Joseph Byrne, an open-source researcher and North Korea specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, told BI.