Kyiv denies supplying missile technology to North Korea:
Ukraine says it has never supplied missile technology to North Korea, reacting after The New York Times quoted experts as saying Pyongyang may have purchased rocket engines from a Ukrainian factory.
"Ukraine has never supplied rocket engines or any kind of missile technology to North Korea," the secretary of Ukraine's Security and Defense Council, Oleksandr Turchynov, said in an August 14 statement.
In its August 14 article, the Times reported that experts believe a missile factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro is "the most likely source of the engines" that powered North Korea's two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July.
The report notes that state-owned factory, known as Yuzhmash, is not far from territory controlled by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
It quoted a new study by Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, and classified assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies.
"It's likely that these engines came from Ukraine -- probably illicitly," Elleman told the Times. "The big question is how many they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I'm very worried." (Reuters, Interfax, The New York Times)