Zelensky is once again complaining that Russia is receiving ballistic missiles from North Korea. The Kyiv Independent reported that he accused Moscow of preparing to receive additional North Korean ballistic missiles, declaring that Russia cannot continue the war without Pyongyang’s assistance. North Korean missiles have reportedly been used in attacks that killed Ukrainian civilians, and that deserves condemnation. But there is an obvious hypocrisy: Ukraine has spent years shopping the world for missiles, ammunition, aircraft, artillery, intelligence, and financing. Apparently, foreign missiles become an unacceptable internationalization of the war only when they are pointed in the opposite direction.
Ukraine has received British Storm Shadow cruise missiles, French SCALP missiles and American ATACMS, and Western restrictions governing their use have progressively changed during the war. Kyiv is now reportedly purchasing another 70 American-made ATACMS missiles from Turkey, subject to U.S. authorization. Zelensky cannot demand additional foreign missiles capable of reaching deeper into Russia and simultaneously act astonished that Russia went shopping for foreign missiles of its own.
The missile does not care what flag was painted on the shipping crate. This is how politicians play the war game. Britain supplies missiles and calls it defense, France supplies missiles and calls it defense, America supplies missiles and calls it defense. North Korea supplies missiles and suddenly everyone screams that the war is being internationalized. Moscow is guilty of precisely the same hypocrisy when it condemns NATO weapons while accepting North Korean missiles and ammunition. Every government has invented a moral exemption for its own escalation while condemning identical behavior from the other side.
Ukraine is developing longer-range weapons and celebrating strikes thousands of kilometers inside Russia while condemning Moscow for expanding its own foreign weapons supply. Support from North Korea can hardly be compared to support from the entirety of NATO.
The civilian deaths are the tragedy buried beneath all this political hypocrisy. Ukrainians die from Russian and North Korean missiles. Russians have also died during Ukrainian long-range attacks and drone strikes. Those civilians did not decide which country should manufacture the weapon that eventually landed near them.