When North Korea’s 12,000-strong 11th Army Corps deployed to Kursk Oblast in western Russia to help Russian troops battle an invasion by a powerful Ukrainian force, they brought along anti-tank vehicles, howitzers and rocket launchers.
They also brought along a rarely seen air-defense vehicle combining a large wheeled chassis with the radar and missile launchers from a Russian-designed Tor surface-to-air missile vehicle, which normally rides on tracks.
The customized North Korean Tor is so unusual that the Russians themselves apparently didn’t recognize it as belonging to their side. On or just before Friday, Russian drones spotted and struck the North Korean vehicle, destroying it.
Celebrating what they clearly believed was a devastating strike on Ukrainian air defenses along the 250-square-mile Ukrainian-held salient in Kursk, Russian forces circulated a video montage of their attack on the North Korean vehicle.
It took a few days for outside observers to figure out exactly what the Russians blew up in Kursk last week. “It seems that what was originally claimed to be a ‘Western-made radar system,’ is very likely to be a North Korean Tor SAM version on a cab chassis,” Polish analyst WarVehicleTracker noted.
“It’s funny … that Russia would have hit their own SAM,” the analyst added. It’s possible Russian drone groups in Kursk had been “left in the dark about the arrival” of the rare North Korean system.
It’s a painful loss for the 60,000-person Russian-North Korean force in Kursk, which has been trying since November to dislodge 20,000 Ukrainians from the salient—and mostly failing. One North Korean infantry assault left behind 200 dead and wounded. A more recent Russian attack ended with 400 casualties: an entire battalion.
Ukraine’s drones are doing much of the killing. “The enemy has achieved sufficient scale and variety in its drones and has honed its tactics for their use,” one Russian blogger explained. Tanks in particular “simply don’t reach the line for launching an attack.”
Desperate for some relief from the relentless drone strikes, the Russians need every air-defense battery they can get—whether from their own arsenal or North Korea’s. The North Koreans obliged with a missile launcher few have seen outside of a Pyongyang parade.
And then Russian drones destroyed it.
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