Ukraine jails North Koreans in missile espionage case

A court in Ukraine has jailed two North Korean citizens on charges of trying to obtain secret technical information about missile engines. A Ukrainian government official said on Monday that the North Koreans had each been sentenced to eight years in prison, and that “they will serve their sentence in Ukraine”. Speaking to Russian-language Ukrainian daily Segodnya, the official said that Ukrainian authorities had expected that Pyongyang would request extradition of its two citizens, but that the North Korean government’s reaction had been “passive”. According to the paper, the two convicted men, who have not been named, were employed by the North Korean trade mission in Belarusian capital Minsk. It was from there that, several months ago, they arrived by train to Kiev, where they tried —unsuccessfully— to recruit a number of locals as informants.

One of the latter tipped off Ukrainian authorities, who placed the two North Koreans under surveillance. Eventually, the two suspects were arrested in a rented garage in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, while photographing technical documents with a pair of handheld miniature digital cameras. The Segodnya report stated that the documents consisted of doctoral dissertations, marked ‘confidential’, which described highly technical methods of designing effective solid- and liquid-fuel supply systems for missile engines. Some of the documents concerned the technical specifications of computer software to assist in the design of missile fuel supply systems, said the paper. The confidential documents had reportedly been taken from the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, a cornerstone of the Soviet —and now the Ukrainian— space industry, which in the early 1960s developed the R-16 (known in the West as SS-7), the first inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) successfully deployed by the Soviet Union.

In the late 1960s, Yuzhnoye built the R-36 ICBM (known in the West as SS-18), which formed the basis of the Soviet Union’s nuclear delivery arsenal. Ukrainian media reports suggest that the alleged espionage efforts by the two North Koreans were closely linked to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, and that the stolen documents could have significantly augmented North Korea’s position in its geopolitical power-struggle with South Korea and the United States. The report in the Segodnya daily said that the two men had pled guilty during their trial and that their lawyer had not appealed the court’s sentence.

JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |