Ukraine Russia’s latest war: Some North Koreans ‘already in Ukraine’ as Kyiv names 160,000 troops

Russian drones, missiles and bombs smashed into Kiev and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s largest cities, in overnight attacks, killing four people and wounding 15 in a sustained airstrike, authorities said on Tuesday.

Russia has bombed civilian areas in Ukraine almost daily since its full-scale invasion of its neighbor nearly three years ago, causing thousands of casualties. The Russian army is also pressing hard on frontline defenses in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was expected to address the new threat at a meeting Tuesday in Reykjavik with the leaders of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

A Russian airstrike hit Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine around 3 a.m., hitting a house and killing four people, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said. Nearly 20 houses were damaged in the attack, he said.

Hours earlier, Russia threw a glide bomb at the landmark Derzhprom building in central Kharkiv, wounding seven people, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

Derzhprom, also known as the Palace of Industry, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an example of modernist architecture.

Terekhov said Russia has concentrated attacks on Kharkiv in recent days. He urged people not to ignore air raid warnings.

Authorities in Kiev said debris from intercepted Russian drones fell on two city districts, injuring six people.

Ukrainian air defense units destroyed 33 of the 62 drones launched by Russia overnight, Ukraine’s air forces said today.

Another 25 of the drones were unexplained, some of which were likely intercepted by Ukraine’s electronic warfare, the Air Force said.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the remaining four drones.

Russia’s air defense units destroyed 23 Ukrainian drones overnight in several western Russian regions, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

Of these, seven Ukrainian drones were destroyed over the Rostov region, five over the Kursk region, four over the Smolensk region and the rest over the Oryol, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, the ministry said.

At least nine people were injured, including an 11-year-old girl, and several apartments were on fire after a Russian drone strike on Kiev, Ukrainian officials said this morning.

Falling debris from a destroyed drone sparked a fire in a multi-story apartment building in the Solomianskyi district of western Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

“So far nine people have been injured,” Mr Klitschko said. “They were all treated by medics at the scene.”

Kyiv’s military administration posted a photo of flames erupting from an apartment in an apartment building. It also said another fire broke out in a multi-storey administrative building in the Solomianskyi district.

Reuters witnesses heard a series of explosions in Kiev in what sounded like air defense units in operation.

Kyiv, its surrounding region and almost the entire eastern half of Ukraine were under air raid alert from about 1.30 GMT.

About 200 defectors from North Korea are eager to join Ukraine’s fight against Russia, a new report says.

“We are all military veterans who understand North Korea’s military culture and psychological state better than anyone else,” a 69-year-old Ahn Chan-il told the South China Morning Post. Several members of the group of defectors all have several years of military experience.

This comes as the Pentagon estimated that 10,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to eastern Russia for training, up from an estimate of 3,000 last week.

The United States has confirmed that some North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk region, a Russian border area where Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion in August and covers hundreds of square kilometers of territory.

South Korean officials have said some of the North Korean troops may have been moved to the front line and expressed concern about what Russia might give Pyongyang in return.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said some North Korean soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine and are believed to be heading toward the Kursk border region. Russian forces are having difficulty pushing back Ukraine’s cross-border incursion on August 6.

This came hours after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed the latest Ukrainian intelligence reports about the presence of North Korean military units deployed to Kursk near the Ukrainian border.

Infamous Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has vowed revenge for a drone strike that caused a fire at a military training academy in his southern Russian region.

Ukraine has frequently targeted Russia with drones during the war, but Tuesday’s strike appeared to be the first against Chechnya.

Kadyrov told reporters in a video published by the Russian state news agency RIA: “They have bitten us – we will destroy them. In the very near future we will show them the kind of revenge they have never even dreamed of.”

Earlier, Kadyrov wrote on Telegram that the drone strike had set fire to the roof of what he said was an empty building at the “special forces university” in the city of Gudermes. There were no injuries, he said.

Two Western intelligence officials have said that a number of North Korean troops are already inside Ukraine, CNN reported.

“It appears that many of them are already in action,” the official said, without elaborating on a number of North Korean forces fighting in the Ukraine war.

The officials said they expect the number of North Korean soldiers inside Ukraine to grow as they complete training in eastern Russia and await deployment to the war front.

The United States confirmed yesterday that some North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk region, a Russian border area where Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion in August and has hundreds of square kilometers of territory.

A few thousand more were on their way there, the Pentagon said.

Russia held a training exercise on Tuesday to simulate a “massive nuclear strike” in response to a first strike by an enemy, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov said.

President Vladimir Putin launched the exercise at a critical time in the Ukraine war. The exercise, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said was a regular, planned event, involved the firing of ballistic and cruise missiles.

As part of the exercise, a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile was fired from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia to the Kura test range in Kamchatka in the Far East, the Defense Ministry said.

Sineva and Bulava ballistic missiles were launched from submarines in the Barents and Okhotsk seas. Tu-95MS strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons launched cruise missiles.

All the missiles hit their targets, the Defense Ministry said.