• North Korea unveiled a sophisticated new naval vessel, the Choe Hyon, on Friday.
• Military analysts told Business Insider its weapons might have been developed with Russian aid.
• The closer relationship between Russia and North Korea is a worrying sign for the West.

In a ceremony in the North Korean port of Nampo on Friday, Kim Jong Un unveiled the Choe Hyon, a 5,000-ton frigate that appears to be outfitted with an array of powerful weapons systems, such as missile vertical launchers.

Perhaps equally worrying for those in the West, military analysts said that some of the vessel's capabilities point to Russian involvement, or at least Russian inspiration, as the Kim regime builds modern warships.

"The timing of the ship's construction and the question marks around the exact nature of Russian support for the DPRK suggest that it might well be more than a simple copy," Jacob Parakilas, a research leader for Defence Strategy, Policy and Capabilities at RAND Europe, told Business Insider.

(Parakilas referred to North Korea by the acronym of its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.)

The warship could point to further evidence of a deepening military relationship, and comes at a time when both countries said officially for the first time that North Korean troops are fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine.

Missile systems

The Choe Hyon is bristling with weapons systems, with images indicating vertical launch systems that could be used to fire cruise or ballistic missiles, a deck gun, close-in air defense weapons, and a radar to detect threats and targets.

Images show the Choe Hyon fitted with a missile defense system that closely resembles Russia's Pantsir S-1, which fires medium-range guided missiles at aerial threats.

Parakilas referenced the air defense system as the clearest evidence of Russian involvement.

Meanwhile, Kim Duk-ki, a retired South Korean admiral, told CNN earlier this month that Russia may have provided technology for its missile systems.

He also said that "if North Korea equips the new frigate with the hypersonic ballistic missile it claimed to have successfully tested in January, that will cause a game changing impact in the regional security."

A ship for total war

Evidence is emerging that Russia could be helping North Korea evade international sanctions by providing it with technology to strengthen and modernise its military.

In March, James Patton Rogers, executive director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, told the BBC that Russia likely helped North Korea design a new AI-enabled drone.

Parakilas said the sheer number of weapons on board the Choe Hyon points to possible Russian influence, with Russia also favoring smaller, heavily armed vessels.

"It also reflects a philosophy that the purpose of a warship is to wage total war, rather than to be capable of a range of operations up to and including war," he said.

But Joseph Bermudez Jr., Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, cautioned that no evidence existed of "direct Russian assistance" in its construction.

He said that "North Korean naval personnel designers have seen more and more Russian vessels" and may be imitating their design.

Even so, he said that the vessel's weapon systems have "an awful lot of capability."

A 'first strike' option

According to a January report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank, the frigate appears to be around 120 meters long, making it the "largest North Korea has constructed by some margin."

North Korea has around 374 smaller patrol and coastal vessels, the IISS said, as well as two older frigates.

At the launch event, Kim said that North Korea would be ready to fully deploy the ship in about a year, while touting it as a defense against what he portrayed as US regional aggression.

Parakilas said the new warship offers North Korea increased options for a potential ballistic missile "first strike," with the capacity to travel to regions where there may be fewer air defense systems.

However, he said that "the fact that it is a surface ship and not a submarine means that it can be tracked and attacked relatively easily."

In its report, the IISS said that it's only when the vessel enters service that its real capabilities will be observable.

"While activity around the new vessel at Nampo will be closely monitored," it said, "it may be some time after launch until its intended use becomes clearer."

Bermudez Jr. echoed this, saying that "once it goes out on patrol and we see the seaworthiness of it, that'll make a tremendous difference."

• The war in Ukraine is showing the power of weaponry once thought outdated.
• Mines and artillery have proven essential, alongside cutting-edge tech like AI and drones.
• One expert told BI that mines and shells are "useful, even dominant" when armies are dug in.

The war in Ukraine is showing that weapons once thought redundant remain indispensable — and NATO countries are playing catch-up as they race to rearm.

Last week, Finland became the latest European country to repeal a decades-old ban on the use of anti-personnel land mines. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have already announced they were abandoning the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which prohibited the use, manufacture, and sale of anti-personnel land mines.

The countries are gearing up to fortify their borders with Russia using land mines as the Kremlin refocuses its economy on its military and relations with the West deteriorate.

While the war includes examples of cutting-edge technology, it also underlines the importance of weapons like shells and mines.

As Europe enters "an era of rearmament," it's learning it needs to invest in technology it previously thought would be redundant in fast-moving, tech-heavy wars they envisaged would define the 21st century.

Ukraine has used mines to slow the larger Russian army's advances in the east and south of the country to a stalemate and to channel enemy troops into areas that its forces can defend.

While the sophisticated precision-guided missiles NATO has provided Ukraine are susceptible to Russian electronic jamming that scrambles the signals used to guide them, comparatively crude — and cheap — shells don't have this drawback.

Ukraine's European allies have boosted shell production. But last week, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia was on track to build a shell stockpile "three times greater than the United States and Europe combined."

In a recent paper, the Royal United Services Institute, a UK defense think tank, said European governments had expected private sector defense firms to "solve the problem" of ammunition production but failed to introduce "any incentives or a regulatory environment that would allow it to do so."

Nato had been planning for a different war

Paul van Hooft, a defense research leader at the UK-based think tank RAND Europe, told BI that the threat from Russia was very different from what Western military leaders had planned for.

"For three decades, as Western militaries were not focused on large-scale land warfare and territorial-NATO collective defense, these weapons [such as shells and land mines] were not considered as valuable — specifically in Western Europe," he told BI by email.

After the 9/11 attacks, NATO allies planned for wars against militias such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, where land mines and shells had little obvious use, said van Hooft.

But fighting a land war against a large army requires defending and holding large swaths of territory.

Artillery may be old technology but it's more effective when used alongside newer surveillance tech like drones, said Van Hooft.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Defense and Security Department in Washington, DC, said that as the war in Ukraine has become more static, shells and land mines have once again been proven indispensable.

"These weapons become useful, even dominant, whenever the front lines stabilize," he said. "They are difficult to employ when armies are maneuvering but easy to employ when armies stalemate and dig in."

In Ukraine, drones have been used to surveil battlefields, identify troops gatherings or command posts — and pinpoint positions to target with artillery barrages.

Cancian cautioned against military planners becoming "enamored with flashy concepts of future warfare" as billions are poured into European defense budgets and military tech startups compete for business selling cutting-edge drones and AI-integrated weapons.

"Artillery-firing, unguided munitions are still critical," he said, adding, "Notions that the next war would be fought by small teams firing precision munitions has not turned out to be the case."

• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said AI posed an "extreme risk" in some scenarios.
• He told BBC News the technology could be used in "a bad biological attack from some evil person."
• World leaders discussed the risks and opportunities posed by AI at a summit in Paris this week.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned of the potential threat posed by AI in the hands of hostile states or terrorists and said it presented an "extreme risk" in some scenarios.

"Think about North Korea, or Iran, or even Russia, who have some evil goal. This technology is fast enough for them to adopt that they could misuse it and do real harm," he told BBC News, pointing to the risk of weapons being developed for "a bad biological attack from some evil person."

"I always worry about the 'Osama bin Laden' scenario, where you have a really evil person who takes over some aspect of our modern life and uses it to harm innocent people," Schmidt said.

He was referring to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, where terrorists from Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization hijacked planes and flew them into buildings.

Schmidt was speaking from the AI summit in Paris this week, where Vice President JD Vance criticized European regulations designed to restrict the technology's dangers.

Schmidt, who was Google CEO for a decade until 2011, has criticized European AI laws as being too strict, but in the interview, said that it was important for governments to regulate AI.

"It's really important that governments understand what we're doing and keep their eye on us," he said of private sector firms developing the tech.

Schmidt said he backed the Biden administration's restriction of sales of microchips that power AI to all but 18 countries not deemed to pose a threat.

It's not the first time Schmidt has warned of the dangers posed by AI. In December he said humans needed to have meaningful control of AI when it's used in military drones.

His startup, White Stork, is developing drones for Ukraine to use in its war with Russia.

At the summit, Schmidt also addressed China's rise as an AI tech power, telling The Financial Times the West needs to invest in open source AI models to keep pace.

"If we don't do something about that, China will ultimately become the open-source leader and the rest of the world will become closed-source," Schmidt said.

It comes after Chinese firm DeepSeek in January released an AI model developed more cheaply than US rivals such as ChatGPT, roiling stock markets.

DeepSeek's R1 is itself open-source, as is Meta's Llama. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has shifted to a closed-source approach.

Schmidt is 48th on the Bloomberg rich list with a net worth of $35.7 billion, largely derived from his 1% holding in Alphabet, which owns Google.

OpenAI says it plans to let U.S. National Laboratories, the Department of Energy’s network of R&D labs, use its AI models for nuclear weapons security and other scientific projects. Per CNBC, OpenAI will work with Microsoft, its lead investor, to deploy a model on the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The model will be a […]

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• NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance makes new weapons too slowly.
• He said Western militaries had focused too much on very high standards that hampered progress.
• "Speed is of the essence, not perfection," Rutte told an event at Davos.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance needs to urgently speed up its development of new weapons.

"We are too slow in innovating," Rutte said at an event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.

"One of the problems here we have is that the better is the enemy of good: It has to be perfect," Rutte said of the current paradigm.

"But it doesn't have to be perfect."

He pointed to the war production of Ukraine, driven by necessity, as a better model.

Ukraine, he said, will proceed with equipment that is a "six to seven," out of 10 while NATO militaries insist on reaching "nine or 10."

"Speed is of the essence, not perfection," he said, calling on the alliance to focus on "getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction."

Ukraine's high-end weaponry from the US and others has been a crucial part of its arsenal.

But only a minority of its troops get that technology. Much of the fighting involves using vast quantities of lower-tech equipment, including decades-old tanks and artillery pieces deployed by both Ukraine and Russia.

Russia now reportedly outpaces Ukraine's NATO allies in its production of key military equipment including shells, having geared its economy towards military production.

Ukraine has also produced large amounts of relatively unsophisticated gear, including adapting commercially available tech for use in war at a tiny fraction of the cost of military versions.

Rutte said at the panel that in Ukraine it isn't unusual for a $400 drone to take out an enemy vehicle that cost millions.

NATO is under pressure from President Donald Trump to boost its spending, and for its non-US members to take a larger role in European defense.

Members have committed to spend 2% of GDP on defense, a threshold many do not meet.

Trump wants members to boost spending to as high as 5%, having accused allies of freeloading off the US in the past.

The US spends around 3.5% of GDP on defense.

Rutte, at the event, said he supported Trump's call for members to invest more in defense and said they needed to focus on innovation — or face even higher defense bills in the future.

"We have to get it into a balance with what the US is spending," Rutte said.

Today, Anduril announced it is building their massive weapons factory, Arsenal-1, in Columbus, Ohio, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting.

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