Joe Byrne

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.

Beyond the Ukrainian battlefield, the performance of North Korean missiles is of interest to South Korea and Japan, where military experts are eager to understand these systems to hone their own defence capabilities, said Joe Byrne, a North Korea specialist at the Royal United Services Institute defence think tank in London. Any assessment in actual operations will also be useful for the North Koreans to improve their weapons and make them more accurate, Byrne said. "North Korean state media always portrays these missiles to be highly sophisticated and accurate, yet this data may tell a different story," he told Reuters.

As much as anything, by sending missiles and ammunition to Russia, North Korea has gained the attention of the world and diplomatic perks from Moscow. “I think they value that quite a lot,” said Joseph Byrne, a research fellow who specializes in North Korea at the Royal United Services Institute, a British security think tank. “The ceremony of it, the legitimacy of it. It just makes North Korea that much stronger,” Mr. Byrne said, “if it looks like they have the full support of Russia.”