Zelensky: North Korean KN-23 missiles hit a vital energy facility – how he explains the Russian escalation before Abu Dhabi

Russia used North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles against a vital Ukrainian energy facility on the night of Saturday, November 7, according to Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president made the claim on Saturday afternoon, after a videoconference meeting on the consequences of the strike, citing the preliminary findings of experts examining the impact sites.

The KN-23, he noted, is manufactured and supplied by Pyongyang. “This is yet more proof that the global sanctions regimes must be significantly strengthened, against everyone in the world who offers their ‘services’ for the destruction of lives,” he wrote.

In the same post Zelensky gave the night’s toll: 36 missiles on a ballistic trajectory, of which only four were neutralised. In the morning he had described the overall picture, with 172 drones and all the missiles aimed at Kyiv and its region. The main target was energy. In the Kyiv region substations linking the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear plants to the capital and central Ukraine were hit, while substations in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk were also damaged. Nine people were injured, among them a child. The damage in the capital is described in our report on the Northern Bridge and Kyiv’s power supply.

Zelensky ties the intensity of the strikes directly to diplomacy. “Russia is preparing for the trilateral negotiations by launching ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s critical infrastructure,” he wrote in the morning. In the afternoon he added that Moscow “understands diplomacy in a particular way, as a sub-type of aggression,” and that by escalating precisely now it is trying to prepare the ground for pressure on the position of Ukraine and its partners. He also admitted a serious shortage of missiles for Patriot systems, which, he said, mainly the United States can cover.

Orders also came out of the meeting. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi, together with Kyiv’s city administration, will prepare backup plans for the capital’s transport and additional means of transportation, since at city level such plans do not in practice exist. Zelensky also referred to preparing meetings in the G7 format with Ukrainian participation, to new European contributions to the PURL programme and to new energy support packages.

Whom Putin invited for the talks

The trilateral meeting of Ukraine, Russia and the US is set for November 10 and 11 in Abu Dhabi, with US mediation. At the Security Council meeting on November 6, Vladimir Putin confirmed that the talks begin on Tuesday in the United Arab Emirates and thanked their leadership. He said he had invited to the meeting those who will take part in the talks. Beyond the permanent members, the Kremlin named among those present his aides Vladimir Medinsky and Yuri Ushakov, Deputy Foreign Ministers Mikhail Galuzin and Sergei Ryabkov, Igor Kostyukov, head of the General Staff’s Main Directorate (military intelligence) and Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and Yuri Zhigarlovsky, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff. For the US side we reported Trump’s remarks after meeting Putin’s envoy.

In an interview with CNN, Zelensky warned that the Russian aim of starting the discussion from a new security architecture for Europe is dangerous. First, he said, the end of the war and guarantees for Ukraine must be discussed. “We do not want a ‘Yalta 2.0’.”