Ukraine's Defense Intelligence, also known as HUR, has given Japan's parliament speaker a rare, close look at a North Korean weapon: the components of a ballistic missile Russia fired at Ukraine. Ukrainian officers have shown the parts to Eisuke Mori, speaker of Japan's House of Representatives, during his delegation's visit to Kyiv, HUR says on social media.

Ukraine has become the place where North Korea's missiles are tested in combat and taken apart. Pyongyang has supplied Russia with roughly 150 KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles since late 2023, along with thousands of troops, and Russia has fired scores of them at Ukrainian cities.

Each strike gives Pyongyang combat data that has sharpened its weapons. Showing Japan the components turns that access into a prospect of future deterrence: the same missiles threaten the Asia-Pacific.

Ukraine hands Japan the evidence

Examining missile parts allows analysts to read the missile's technical characteristics, design, and the state of North Korea's arms industry, HUR says. Ukraine has found that the North Korean missiles falling on its cities are built partly from foreign parts, with components traced to companies in Britain, Japan, Switzerland, China, and the US, Radio Free Asia reports, evidence of how Pyongyang skirts sanctions to build them.

The threat reaches the Pacific

HUR frames the demonstration as a shared-security case. North Korean weapons endanger not only Ukraine but Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific, it says, while the Moscow-Pyongyang partnership lets Russia keep waging its war and lets Pyongyang build up its arsenal and refine its weapons.

"Countering this cooperation requires coordinated action by international partners. Sharing intelligence helps better assess common threats and find ways to overcome them," HUR states.

Pyongyang learns from the strikes

North Korea has sent Russia millions of artillery shells, rocket systems, and thousands of troops, and is paid in cash and technology, with one analyst estimating Pyongyang may have earned about $20 billion from the war. In return, the missiles' accuracy has improved as Pyongyang studies how they perform under fire, turning the war into a live proving ground for weapons built to threaten its neighbors.

Ukrainian engineers near the front rewrite their drones' software every couple of days. A NATO army needs about six months to push the same update. That gap in speed is the central challenge for the Western trainers working with Ukrainian troops in Poland, who say Ukraine's wartime tempo is exposing how slowly the West moves in peacetime, the Business Insider reports.

Russia's war forces the Ukrainian Army to buy, train, and adapt at a pace peacetime armies are not built for, and its experience is pushing NATO to confront how much its own bureaucracy slows it down.

The alliance has studied that experience without yet fully absorbing it: in an Estonian war game last winter, a ten-person Ukrainian drone team wiped out two NATO battalions in a day.

Now NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is calling for a large-scale transformation of the West's defense industry so its armies can react faster.

Two speeds meet in Poland

The place where those speeds collided was Camp Jomsborg, a base Norway built in an eastern Polish forest in a matter of months. There, under an operation called Legio, trainers from across northern Europe drill Ukrainian soldiers while the Ukrainians hand their front-line lessons back to NATO.

The camp sits, as its operations officer, a major identified only as John, put it,  at "the mental and geographical middle point between war in the east and peacetime mechanism in the West."

A drone update tells the story

Brigadier General Atle Molde, who commands the task force, put the gap in numbers. If a Western drone needs new software, he said, "you have to send it to a Western country or a company, and an update takes six months." 

In Ukraine, "they have the engineers sitting close to the front updating every two days, every two weeks, developing software, adapting it to genuine situations."

Molde said he wants to see greater initiative in innovation within Western armies, but to achieve that, "it has to be some major changes that have to be done on all levels when it comes to legislation."

The US is preparing to sell Ukraine something unusual: American-made missiles for its Soviet S-300 air-defense systems. The missiles, labeled "S-300 Clone" in the paperwork, are part of a $2.68 billion package that the State Department approved on 18 September, financed by European partners and unused US military aid, Defense Express reports.

Ukraine has plenty of Soviet-era S-300 launchers but not the missiles to feed them. Russia will not sell more, and an earlier Ukrainian attempt to build its own went nowhere, according to Defense Mirror.

Not a Soviet 5V55 replica

At the same time, the missile itself is not actually a "clone" or replica of the Soviet 5V55. According to Defense Express's own information, this is a new development with enhanced characteristics and a different, more modern targeting guidance principle.

At the same time, the American side did not disclose the index, characteristics, or manufacturer of the missiles mentioned in the State Department's statement.

In September 2024, then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced at the Ramstein contact group that Washington, in partnership with several European companies, was working with Ukraine to "design and build a substitute" for the Soviet S-300 and the R-27 air-to-air missile used by fighter jets, Newsweek reports. He never spelled out what that substitute would be.

Anti-radar missile project from the 1950s

The package will also include GAM-67. As for the GAM-67, despite the existence of an unrealized American anti-radar missile project from the 1950s, this is also a new development. It is intended for medium-range systems, both existing ones, including Soviet ones, and future ones.

The package also provides for modernization and maintenance: spare parts, consumables, and accessories, support during repair and return, software, transportation support, engineering, technical, and logistical services from the US government and contractors, and other related elements of logistical and program support.

Ukraine's battle-tested drone makers did not win a single top slot in the Pentagon's latest drone contest. But some Ukrainian technology won anyway, competing quietly under the names of Western partners, The Defender Media reports.

The Pentagon's $1.1 billion Drone Dominance program does not allow direct purchases from Ukrainian firms, which must set up a US legal entity to bid.

The Ukrainians who competed under their own names were hampered by export licenses, the hunt for non-Chinese components, and visa issues, and none of the four cracked the top five in either category.

American firms sweep the top slots

The Pentagon picked five winners each in two categories, long-range strikes out to 15 kilometers and close-in assault. Eric Schmidt's Perennial Autonomy topped the long-range field with its Hornet drone, on 80.1 points, and Neros led the close-in category with 88.1. Neros already supplies Ukraine with 6,000 of its Archer FPV drones.

The rest of the winners, from ORQA's US arm to XTEND and ModalAI, were American as well. All will receive Pentagon supply contracts, with order sizes to be set later.

Ukrainians win under other flags

The Ukrainian firms that announced their entries, F-Drones, General Chereshnya, Grim Tech, and Stellarion, all missed the cut, though General Chereshnya had reached the program's second round earlier in the year.

Bureaucracy tripped the open entrants

Stellarion laid out what went wrong. Getting export permits and moving hardware took so long that integrating American parts, including warheads, and adapting the finished system on schedule became "complicated," its representatives said.

Finding NDAA-compliant, non-Chinese components ate up more time, and visa delays kept its specialists from fixing technical problems on site.

Firms that missed the top five can enter later rounds: a Gauntlet 2.5 contest for bomber drones is set for October, and a third phase begins in February 2027, with missions built to test control of several drones at once.

A soldier of Artan, a special unit of Ukraine's Defense Intelligence, known by the callsign Derun, described the fighting during important Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi, according to Novyny.Live. He says the hardest part of Ukraine's counteroffensive in the northern part of Donetsk Oblast is prying Russian troops out of positions they have fortified so well that they see every approach coming.

Vivaldi is bigger than any one assault. It is the counteroffensive that the Third Army Corps is running near Lyman. The Institute for the Study of War says it has disrupted Russia's plan to encircle the fortified "Fortress Belt" of Donetsk cities, as the corps says its first phase cleared 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators and de-occupied another 10.

Dug-in Russians see every approach

The problem is Russia's preparation, when "the enemy has made his positions very well fortified," Derun said.

"The hardest is to knock him out of there, because when a position is competently prepared, they see everything," he explained.

A well-sited position lets the defenders watch the open ground an assault group has to cross, spot the attackers early, and fight them at a distance, which is the worst way for the attacker to come.

A lapse opens the way in

When Russian troops stop watching the approaches to their position, the assault group can close the gap unseen, Derun said.

"When Russian troops are distracted, it can play into our hands: we can approach under cover, when he does not see us, and work him from close range," he added.

Once the attackers are in close, he added, the defenders can start to panic and make mistakes.

Vivaldi runs to four seasons

Artan fought as part of a larger force. Alongside the Third Army Corps' own brigades, the operation drew in Ukraine's Special Operations Forces, the border guard, and the military-intelligence unit, all under a single tactical command, and it ran for months under an information blackout before the corps disclosed it.

The corps commander, Andrii Biletskyi, said the phase revealed so far is only the first of four, naming the operation for Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

"This is only the first," he said, promising more.

Ukraine's National Guard is setting up its own center to recruit foreigners into its ranks. The center will speed up the process of contracting foreign volunteers and deploying them to combat units as part of an experimental project approved by the government, Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi says.

Around 16,000 foreigners from at least 72 countries already serve in the armed forces, according to Defense Post. The new center formalizes that pipeline for the National Guard, home to some of Ukraine's most effective units, including Azov, which is fighting for Donbas right now, and the Khartiia Corps.

Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov set the ambition higher still, saying in June 2026 that Ukraine wants to fill 30 to 50 percent of its assault and infantry positions with foreigners.

The Guard builds its own pipeline

Until now, foreigners have joined the National Guard through a Defense Ministry recruitment center. To speed things up, the Guard is building its own, which will coordinate the process and walk candidates through every step, from interviews and background checks to training.

"The candidate's path to service should be as fast as possible," Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said, adding that combat units should get their reinforcements more promptly.

Commanders pushed for it

The idea came from the front. Vyhivskyi said National Guard brigade and corps commanders raised it with him during recent trips to frontline regions, and that the center should directly strengthen their combat units.

Foreign recruits are already a fixture of the fight. Large numbers have come from Colombia and across South America, and Colombian volunteers have formed a reconnaissance and assault group within the 47th Mechanized Brigade. Their motivations vary, from combat experience to pay well above what many earn at home, but the effect is the same: extra soldiers for the Ukrainian force.