If the Americans really are interested in whether Pyongyang sold Pyongyang Yuzhmashhev power plants RD-250 for ballistic missiles, then they have someone to ask the question on the forehead. The rocket engines could get to the DPRK from about 2000 to 2016, so you need to ask either the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, who patronized Yuzhmash before 2004, or the next "guardian" of the Dnepropetrovsk plant, the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky.

At the same time, a long-standing mystery can be clarified where the Ukrainian "Kolchugi", supposedly bought by Iraq, were lost, but after the fall of Hussein's regime they were never found.
It was like this. Seventeen years ago, during the SOFEX-2000 arms exhibition in Amman, a certain Jordanian intermediary drove up to the head of Ukrspetseksport Valery Malev. The guest was interested in radars of passive guidance "Kolchuga" and something else, which was not brought to the exhibition, but Ukrainian developers told about it in details. Later, by the way, it turned out that this foreigner was in fact a citizen of Australia, Hyder Sarfraz, but it happened much later. In the meantime, after the exhibition, Malev reported to Kuchma, with whom he had a long-standing trust relationship, that an Arab (Sarfraz was an ethnic Persian) is interested in the developments of Yuzhmash and is ready to pay fabulous money for their samples - $ 100 million for four Kolchuga and as much as a dozen RD-250 rocket engines.

It was incomprehensible only what country this mediator represented - several times he "got confused in the testimony", informing Malev that he was buying the equipment either for Iran or for Iraq. The deal threatened serious complications with the Americans, but Kuchma apparently did not care at that time, so he only ordered: "Just make sure that the Jordanian does not talk." Kuchma also asked Malev: "Can you sell without a Jordanian?" Zhadnichal Leonid Danilovich ...

It turned out - you can not. It would have been necessary to drag an appreciable cargo to Iran or Iraq by itself, and, thus, the combinators would inevitably "burned". In general, the order was collected and sent. And then there was an international scandal.

For whom the RD-250 was bought by an Australian intermediary?

Americans, for whom Baghdad and Tehran were enemies, strained most of all that "Kolchug" turned out to be four - that's what it takes to create a single protective complex. As a result, Kuchma was staged an international obstruction and the first Maydan with the severed head of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. And they began to look for where the "Kolchugi" were sent to, as if sent to Jordan (they were not interested, for some reason, as well as the assembled units spraying the plasma to protect the components of nuclear weapons from corrosion, made in Belarus). But it turned out that even the supervisor of the order, who supervised the dispatch of the order, Leonid Derkach was not aware of the final destination - he persisted in saying that Kolchuga had bought Iraq. In general, the order evaporated, barely leaving the borders of Ukraine. Subsequently, the Americans and did not find it in Iraq, although honestly rummaged almost the whole country. A later found at Sarfraz contract for the supply, concluded with the Iranian company SATAK (weapons listed as securities as gas turbine equipment), was false.

In October 2002, one of four "Kolchug" unexpectedly "found" in Jordan. Together with the part of the documentation, from which it followed that the final destination was ... Pyongyang! It turns out that Sarfraz bought Ukrainian equipment for North Korea? Most likely it was - unless, of course, the papers were forged in someone's interests. And then a series of mysterious deaths followed. In March 2003, Valery Malev crashed in a car crash. A truck left his Audi-A8 jam, the driver of which later disappeared without a trace (the incident is almost an absolute copy of the incidents in which the Belarusian leader, Pyotr Masherov, and Ukrainian politician Vyacheslav Chernovol were killed). Then, when riding a quad, Heider Sarfraz was killed to death. Several male collaborators Malev, who mediated during his contacts with foreigners, also died. Thus ended the first act of this dark history.

The second act occurred in July 2011: the SBU detained two North Korean citizens interested in documentation on the RD-250 and visited the regime enterprises of Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk for this. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the agent of the Ukrainian counterintelligence, from whom the Koreans intended to buy the secret documents of interest to them, offered them to sell not only schemes, but also the rocket engines themselves. But the Koreans flatly refused! Is it because they already had Pyongyang and they did not have only some papers for debugging? There followed a series of detentions, as a result of which three foreigners were deported to the DPRK. And the first two detainees are still imprisoned, in Zhitomir, - they received eight years.

Gerashchenko and his team

And here we come to the final, third act. In the same year, 2011, when the SBU arrested North Korean spies, several Ukrainian citizens were convicted of transferring certain military technologies to certain Chinese (and maybe even not quite Chinese), in particular the electronics professor Vladimir Chumakov and his former student Alexei Rud , As well as a friend of Rudy Sergey Chichotka. They were accused of high treason and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, but in 2014 Rud unexpectedly ended up free - as it turned out later, through the efforts of the adviser to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Anton Gerashchenko, whom his boss Arsen Avakov calls pugsy. You probably ask: why would such a bump as a "pupsic" (Gerashchenko), to worry about the fate of some traitor to the homeland? And even write to him a power of attorney to manage his new Honda Hull Cross, which Rud eventually broke last May? Yes, and arrange it a member of the Attestation Commission of the National Police of Ukraine?

Here is what the former governor of the Kharkov region, Verkhovna Rada deputy Mikhail Dobkin, told about this: "As a governor, I had the right to access the secret information of the Security Service. So I found out that a group of scientists suspected of high treason was exposed on the territory of the region. They sold the documentation for the military article to Koreans who came from China. There appeared Anton Gerashchenko. Two of the detainees were later arrested, and Gerashchenko was released. And when I asked what kind of bird it was, the counterintelligence agents answered evasively. I concluded that Gerashchenko is their man. "

We asked Dobkin if it was really about the Koreans, who were interested in including the documentation for the RD-250. He answered in the affirmative. Thus, an adviser to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko, as well as his close associate Alexei Rud, could have been involved in the transfer of technical documentation to the RD-250 ballistic missile launcher produced by the Yuzhmash plant to North Korean intelligence agents. The general picture is something like this: at the direction of Kuchma, Malev and Derkach sold the engines to the North Korean regime, but local scientists did not have the knowledge and experience to adapt them to their ballistic missiles. It took additional documentation, and Ukraine sent Pyongyang to dispatch agents under the guise of Chinese entrepreneurs. And they got the necessary from Gerashchenko with podelnikami, while the three Koreans, who were released to freedom, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity, could easily take the secret documentation to the RD-250 with them. Here is the clue as to where Kim Jong-un comes from Ukrainian rocket engines.

SPECIFICALLY

According to the German historian of rocket engineering Norbert Brugge, judging by the type of the turbo pump, the dimensions of the combustion chamber and its position on the platform, the engines are really made at "Yuzhmash". Doubts only about how these Ukrainian engines could get to the DPRK. Brugge says that there could have been three ways: from Ukraine, from Russia, which had at its disposal Dnepropetrovsk power plants, or from a third country, the former Soviet republic. The expert believes that Pyongyang got RD-250 not at the beginning of zero, but earlier, during the collapse of the Union. There was only a shortage of documentation, which probably was obtained from Gerashchenko and his accomplices. Anyway, nothing would have happened to Kim Jong-no with ballistic missiles, if not for the new Kiev authorities.