An estimated 3,000 North Korean soldiers have moved into western Russia, South Korean officials said on Wednesday, according to Associated Press. Seoul’s Yonhap The news agency did not confirm that figure, but reported on Wednesday “at least 11,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia, with some sent to Russia’s western region near the border with Ukraine.”

US officials have yet to confirm that the North Koreans are already fighting inside Ukraine, fixed CNN “US officials did not publicly confirm that the troops were in Russia until weeks after South Korea first claimed it.”

Battlefield Latest: Russia’s latest offensive, across a 40-mile front in the east, “has breached Ukrainian defenses in just a few days in many areas”, conflict analyst Emil Kastehelmi writes. “At the moment, the Russians are struggling to expand their offense into a breakthrough. Although the Ukrainians are losing many square kilometers, the defense has not crumbled into chaos, and nothing extremely decisive has been lost,” he adds.

Bigger picture: “The pace of Russian advances in Ukraine has increased in recent weeks but remains slow and consistent with positional warfare rather than rapid mechanized maneuver,” Washington writes. Institute for the Study of War wrote Tuesday. “Russian forces have made recent advances in eastern Ukraine, but comparing these gains to the initial deep Russian penetration into Ukraine at the start of the war misleadingly frames these recent advances,” ISW warns.

Manpower Update: Russia’s Military ‘Recruits Around 30,000 Men Per Month’ which is not quite “enough to meet internal targets”, but it is believed to be enough “to cover even the gigantic losses of the last few months”, Nato officials told Economist this week.

Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Briefbrought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can here. On this day in 2014, Sweden became the first EU member to officially admit the State of Palestine.

Peak times

Russia’s military says it was “practicing launching a massive nuclear strike in response to a nuclear attack by a simulated enemy” on Tuesday. As part of the exercises, the Russians fired a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile from a base near Alaska, submarine-launched ballistic missiles northeast of Norway and north of Japan, and sent strategic Tu-95 bombers that fired air-launched cruise missiles.

The nuclear weapons tests are “a reliable guarantor of our country’s sovereignty and security” and “resolve the problems of strategic deterrence, as well as maintain nuclear parity and the balance of power in the world as objective factors of global stability,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin said in a statement.

Context: Russia’s “focus on weapons of mass destruction is aimed at offering reassurance to a domestic audience amid the uneven performance of Russian troops in Ukraine, and at deterring Western nations from providing more advanced weapons to Ukraine.” New York Times writes.

South Korea’s military says the North is about to conduct its seventh nuclear test, although it is unclear whether it will occur before or after the US election day on November 5 Associated Press reports from Seoul.

“It appears that preparations are almost complete for a long-range ICBM-class missile, including a spacecraft,” South Korea’s Defense Intelligence Agency said on Wednesday, according to Yonhap. “The preparations for a launcher with the carrier are complete and it has been deployed to a certain area,” but no missile has been loaded yet, two lawmakers said.

Rewind: It would not be the first time Russia and North Korea have conducted nuclear drills close to the US presidential election. Eight years ago, North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb less than two months before the election, and Russia announced “nuclear survival drills” the following month.

By the way: South Korean military chief Kim Yong Hyun is visiting the Pentagon today for talks with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his team. Similar calls — under the banner of a US-ROK Security Advisory Meeting— occurs almost every year, including last November with Seoul’s former defense minister.

Industrial strategy

The Pentagon’s Defense Industrial Strategy Implementation Plan was rolled out on Tuesday and includes six “initiatives” for fiscal year 2025, starting with improvements to the missile and submarine industries. The unclassified, nearly 100-page document precedes a classified “annex” to come, Laura Taylor-Kale, who directs the Pentagon’s industrial base policy, told reporters on Tuesday.

The strategy, itself rolled out in January, is broadly aimed at strengthening supply chains to make weapons safe, faster and en masse. The Pentagon spent about $39.4 billion on the strategy in fiscal year 2024 and asked for $37.7 billion in 2025. More than three-quarters of the funds — about $60 billion in total — will go to missiles and munitions, followed by $3.3 billion dollars to the submarine industrial base. and $500 million for the Department of Defense Replicator Initiative.

What can go wrong? Well, Congress may fail to pass the 2025 budget bills before the continuing resolution expires in December, Taylor-Kale said. “It creates a lot of challenges in procurement, in general, and also in planning for us, when we have these continuing decisions.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.

The best way to ensure the Pentagon gets the quantum sensors it needs is to increase R&D spending across the federal government, a new industry-backed Report argues. Currently, the US government spends about $900 million on quantum sensing each year, most go to the Department of Defense. An increase is needed, according to the report, produced by the industry-driven Quantum Economic Development Consortium with funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

By boosting the nascent quantum sensing industry and its efforts to serve domestic markets from aerospace to energy, the report argues, these increases will help answer defense leaders’ years-old demand for new instruments — quantum magnetometers, gravimeters and clocks — that don’t rely on vulnerable signals from space to provide navigation and timing data. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, here.

Europe

Development: A fire at Britain’s nuclear power plant put two workers in hospital. The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at BAE Systems’ six-acre assembly hall in Barrow-in-Furness, where Britain’s four Dreadnought-class missile boats and an Astute attack sub are being built. The Lancaster Guardian and BBC have some more.

And finally: Spain has deployed 1,000 soldiers to help evacuate people from floods which has so far killed at least 64 people. Military contingency unit deployed videos of certain rescues with aerial bridges. Read more at New York Times.