Originally Posted by
tartare
Perhaps.
One thing I have wondered is if they have a limited stock of Ukranian engines, rather than having successfully reverse engineered them and made their own.
The rumours circulated for some years that N-Koreans indeed had smuggled smth from Ukraine. Three topics/options were addressed: a) complete technical documentation was stolen that allowed NK to greatly accelerate engineering and production processes, b) some real engines were illegally imported (some even wrote about the routes through middle east), c) NK hired Ukrainian engineers that lost their jobs when the country stopped support to plants in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnepr).
IMHO option a) is very realistic. Even higher management of the Yuzhmash in Dnepr recently assumed that the leak of documentation likely happened. Two NK spies were caught and now in prison, but how many were not caught, nobody knows. Option b) seems not so likely to me because the entire Ukraine is for a long time under tight control of CIA and the latter would prevent any deal of that kind. Option c) seems very realistic. Controlling people is a much more difficult task than large hardware items. The guys might leave their home country for a vacation in UAE or Turkey and then escape to Far East.