Considering the reported weapons deal between Russia and North Korea the fact that the Russian military is using cheaply made North Korean missiles should not be a suprise:

A man photographs parts of an unidentified missile, which Ukrainian authorities believe to be made in North Korea and was used in a strike in Kharkiv earlier this week, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Jan. 6. Reuters-Yonhap

The Kharkiv region prosecutor’s office provided further evidence on Saturday that Russia attacked Ukraine with missiles supplied by North Korea, showcasing the fragments.

A senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that Russia hit Ukraine this week with missiles supplied by North Korea for the first time during its invasion.

Dmytro Chubenko, spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, said the missile, one of several that hit the city of Kharkiv on Jan. 2, was visually and technically different from Russian models.

“The production method is not very modern. There are deviations from standard Iskander missiles, which we previously saw during strikes on Kharkiv. This missile is similar to one of the North Korean missiles,” Chubenko told media as he displayed the remnants.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Just another example of how the Kim regime plans to increase tensions during the U.S. Presidential election year:

The gun ports of the coastal artillery (circled in red) on a North Korean island near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto maritime border, remain open, in this photo taken from South Korea’s front-line island of Yeonpyeong on Jan. 7, 2023. (Yonhap)

North Korea fired some 90 artillery shots into waters off its western coast Sunday, South Korea’s military said, the latest in a series of drills near the tensely guarded western border. 

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the artillery firings into the maritime buffer zone north of Northern Limit Line, the de-facto maritime border in the Yellow Sea, and South Korea’s border island of Yeonpyeong from about 4 p.m. to 5:10 p.m.

The buffer zone was set under a 2018 inter-Korean military accord designed to reduce tensions along the border.

There was no damage to the South Korean military or civilians from the latest firing, a JCS official said, adding that the South Korean military does not plan to hold drills in response.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section of this first Open Thread of 2024.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service is one of the suspects of who was the overall mastermind of a prostitution ring that specialized in servicing people who work for the government or defense industry:

The two brothels in Virginia (referred to in the affidavit as ‘Target Locations 8 and 9’) were situated in Unit 245 at the Avalon Mosaic in the quiet suburban town of Fairfax and Unit 649 of the nearby Hanover Tysons

Intelligence experts are becoming increasingly convinced that six high end brothels in the suburbs of Boston and Washington, D.C. were set up by a foreign nation as an espionage ‘honeytrap’.

They believe the brothels – allegedly masterminded by a 41-year-old South Korean woman – targeted politicians, high ranking government officials and defense contractors. 

But the mystery is which country was behind the scheme. Russia, China, Korea itself, or even Israel are al seen as possibly being behind the scheme.

‘Having the Koreans out front could have been a false flag to give China or another country plausible deniability if the plot unraveled,’ a one-time CIA senior operations officer told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

Daily Mail

Considering how stupid the people going to this brothel are they probably shouldn’t be working any where near the government:

Aspiring clients had to submit a membership application before they could book an appointment.

Required documentation included government-issued ID, phone and email contacts, employer information and credit card records, according to court records.

Bizarrely, numerous political, military and business officials provided it all without blinking an eye and proceeded to have sex in an apartment that for all they knew was outfitted with equipment to record video and audio footage.

‘Finding idiots like this would be pure gold for an intelligence service running a honeypot,’ said the retired foreign spy. 

A retired CIA senior operations officer was equally flabbergasted. 

‘This is at the level of a Nigerian prince scam,’ she said.

You can read much more at the link, to include a number of pictures of the prostitutes. Judging by the pictures these were some high-end Korean prostitutes working for this ring. Would China be able to recruit this many South Korean women to work for them? It seems more likely that the ROK NIS would be able to pull this off and according to the article ROK intelligence has attempted honeypot operations in the past to collect intelligence. It will be interesting if we will ever hear who was actually behind this honeypot operation.

Notice Kim Jong-un said that North Korea would abandon efforts to peacefully reunify with South Korea, this means takign over the South by force is still on the table. In other words really nothing has changed:

North Korea will scrap its efforts to reunify the Korean Peninsula due to South Korea’s “collusion with foreign forces,” the country’s state-run news agency reported Sunday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the five-day, end-of-year ruling party plenary meeting in Pyongyang last week made a “decisive policy change” toward South Korea, according to a Korean Central News Agency report published Sunday.

Kim said Pyongyang will abandon its efforts to reunify the peninsula because of Seoul’s insistence on the “collapse of the [North Korean] regime” and “absorbing” the North, KCNA reported.

North Korean media frequently claim that efforts to peacefully reunite the peninsula following the 1950-53 Korean War is stymied by U.S.-South Korean military drills and economic sanctions.

“It is not suitable to … [North Korea] to discuss the issue of reunification with the strange clan, who is no more than a colonial stooge of the [United States],” the report said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

You have to be an idiot if you think the ROK Defense Minister’s prior Facebook posting in anyway supports Japan’s claim to Dokdo. However, there are parliamentary elections in April in South Korea so expect a lot of stupid stuff like this to get brought up:

Defense Minister Shin Won-sik is facing criticism for his past remarks describing the nation’s easternmost islets of Dokdo as “disputed territory,” which critics claim reflects a distorted view of history.

“It is true that there are ongoing historical disputes, and territorial disputes regarding sovereignty over Dokdo between Korea and Japan,” Shin wrote in a Facebook post dated March 23, 2023, when he was a ruling People Power Party (PPP) lawmaker.

This view contradicts the official stance of the Korean government that the nation has long maintained effective territorial control of Dokdo – which Japan claims is its own territory – and therefore, there is no territorial dispute over the islets.

Shin further criticized liberal politicians for fueling anti-Japanese sentiment based on “outdated animosity towards the long-gone Imperial Japanese militarism.”

The Facebook post is currently hidden following several media reports about it.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.