Ukraine reportedly destroyed a KN-09 rocket launcher in Kursk Oblast, striking a blow against Moscow’s foreign weapons pipeline.
David Axe
May 12, 2025
Euromaidan Press
Ukrainian artillery and drones have taken a heavy toll on Russia’s huge force of mobile rocket launchers, which are some of the Russians’ best weapons for blasting gaps in Ukrainian defenses. So Moscow has turned to its new ally, Pyongyang—and gotten extra launchers.
But for Ukraine, the arrival of these North Korean launchers along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine isn’t just a threat. It’s also an opportunity—to hunt them down with drones and blow them up with HIMARS.
This is exactly what happened last week with the reported first-ever destruction of a KN-09 in Russia’s Kursk Oblast. According to Militarnyi, the strike happened with a US-made HIMARS after the target was located and adjusted for fire using a reconnaissance drone operated by Ukraine’s 4th Ranger Regiment.
At least one expert disputed the target’s identity. Open-source intelligence analyst Jakub Janovsky claimed the vehicle the HIMARS hit wasn’t a North Korean-made KN-09, but a rare Russian BM-27.
Ukraine can’t shoot down all of Russia’s missiles. So they’re blowing them up before launch.
The Russian armed forces widened their invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with more than 1,000 wheeled rocket launchers in their inventories.
These 1,000 launchers—including BM-21s, BM-27s and BM-30s respectively ranging 20 kms, 35 kms and 120 kms—represented one of the biggest tactical rocket arsenals in the world.
But in 39 months of hard fighting, the Russians have lost nearly 500 of these original launchers to Ukrainian drones and artillery.
While they’ve pulled potentially hundreds of old rocket vehicles out of long-term storage, the Russians probably haven’t been able to generate enough replacement launchers to both make good battlefield losses and equip new units in a steadily expanding Russian military that now needs many more rocket vehicles than it did three years ago.
Support from North Korea, which is already supplying up to half of Russia’s ammunition, has become vital: in May, the first video footage of Korean rocket launchers being used in combat surfaced.
Dwindling rocket arsenal
Stocks of 122-mm, 220-mm, and 300-mm rocket ammunition for the Russian-made launchers may also be running low. For Russia, access to North Korean rockets is as important as access to North Korean rocket launchers. But Ukrainian forces are beginning the laborious process of tracking down and destroying those launchers.
The KN-09s and M-1991s are powerful additions to the Russian artillery corps. They outshoot almost every artillery system in the Ukrainian inventory—except the HIMARS, in certain respects.
The North Korean army hides its M-1991s in mountain redoubts along the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. In wartime, the launchers could bombard Seoul, which lies just 60 km from the DMZ.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., the M-1991s are “a key means by which North Korea holds Seoul and South Korea at risk.”
In Russian service, the launchers could strike Ukrainian trenches and fire back at Ukraine’s own howitzers and launchers. Equally worryingly, they could hit cities such as Kharkiv, which is situated just 40 km from the Russia-Ukraine border.
The KN-09s with their 200-km-range rockets are even more dangerous than the M-1991s are.
The problem for the Ukrainians, as they hunt down Russia’s North Korean-made rocket launchers, is that their best weapons for the hunt—the HIMARS with their 92-km-range M30/31 rockets—are exclusively made in America. The United States under Pres. Donald Trump briefly withheld aid from Ukraine in early March—and could do so again as Trump tries to pressure Ukraine into accepting a peace deal that favors Russia.
The Russians have already destroyed four of Ukraine’s roughly 40 HIMARS. And it’s unclear how many of the launchers’ M30/31 rockets the Ukrainians have in reserve—perhaps just a few hundred.
US support, in the form of additional HIMARS and compatible rockets, could prove critical as Ukrainian gunners intensify their attacks on the M-1991s and KN-09s.
We don’t know how many KN-09s and M-1991s North Korea has and how many it has given to Russia. In January, Ukraine’s spy chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said that Pyongyang supplied 170 M-1991s and was expected to make another shipment.
We do know that, after this week, there’s at least one fewer KN-09.