It is arguable that the use of the occupied Kuril Islands for this military exercise is to signal to Japan that China will help Russia defend them in a contingency. With the Russian military so bogged down in Ukraine it is likely Russia could not hold these islands if the Japanese made a move on them:

 Japan has protested to Russia over multinational military exercises being conducted on Russian-held islands claimed by Japan, and is seriously concerned about shooting drills by Russian and Chinese warships off Japan’s northern coast, an official said Monday.

Beijing has been increasing its military cooperation with Moscow, and has been taking part in the multinational “Vostok 2020” drills since late August at a number of locations in Russia’s far east.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno criticized Russia for holding exercises on two of the four disputed islands, which Japan calls the Northern Territories, in the Kuril chain off Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido. It was not clear whether China was part of the exercises on the disputed islands.

He said Japan’s Defense Ministry spotted six Russian and Chinese warships firing machine guns into the Sea of Japan about 190 kilometers (118 miles) west of Cape Kamui on Hokkaido on Saturday.

“Japan will continue to monitor the movements of these ships with serious concern, and will take all possible measures to conduct warning and surveillance activities in the waters surrounding Japan,” Matsuno said at a news conference.

SF Gate

You can read more at the link, but Russian and Chinese warships also passed through the Soya Straight between Honshu and Hokkaido once again demonstrating how they are trying to intentionally be provocative towards Japan.

I just don’t understand why people cannot just stay inside and wait until the storm passes. It seems every typhoon the casualty are caused by people not bunkering down inside:

Three people were found dead and eight others went missing in South Korea after Typhoon Hinnamnor passed by the southern part of the country Tuesday, authorities said.

Pohang city officials said seven people were reported to be out of contact after entering the inundated underground parking lot of an apartment building in the city at around 6:30 a.m. to remove their cars. 

Rescuers are currently carrying out an operation to drain the parking garage and find those missing. 

A 66-year-old woman who was unaccounted for after entering the underground parking garage of another apartment building in Pohang in the morning was found dead six hours later, the officials said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This is a nice troll response by the Ukraine Defense Ministry to news that the Russians are buying munitions from the North Koreans:

Russia has been forced to buy military hardware from North Korea as sanctions squeeze Moscow’s ability to supply its military, the US says.

A US official revealed Moscow is the process of purchasing millions of rockets and artillery shells from Pyongyang for use in Ukraine.

And they said that Russia could be forced to buy additional North Korean weaponry as the war dragged on. 

Buying from North Korea is a sign of “severe supply shortages”, they added.

The intelligence was first reported by the New York Times. Ukraine’s defence ministry tweeted a mocking response to the report, saying that it showed “Soviet weapons” had “exhausted their potential”.

The ministry said the while Ukraine was switching to Nato standards, Russia was heading in the direction of North Korean standards – be it in the field of “weapons, politics or standard of living”.

BBC

You can read more at the link.

Park Sang-hak is taking advantage of the change in government in South Korea to ramp up his balloon launch activities again after being largely silenced by the previous Moon administration:

An activist said he has again flown huge balloons carrying COVID-19 relief items and an anti-North Korea placard across the tense inter-Korean border, despite the North’s recent warning of a deadly attack over his activities.

Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist, said the 20 balloons launched from a South Korean border town on Sunday carried 20,000 masks and tens of thousands of Tylenol and Vitamin C tablets.

He said one of the balloons carried a placard with a message that reads “Let’s eradicate Kim Jong Un and (his sister) Kim Yo Jong,” along with their photos. He said no other propaganda statements were carried by the balloons.

For years, Park has floated helium-filled balloons with numerous, small anti-Pyongyang leaflets with harsh criticism of the Kim family’s authoritarian rule in North Korea. But he’s recently changed his cargo to masks and other health products amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

You would think this professor would have better things to do than trolling Japanese websites looking for anything not labeling Dokdo correctly. What a sad life to lead:

The foreign ministry lodged a strong protest against Japan’s weather agency for labeling South Korea’s easternmost Dokdo islets as Japanese territory in maps depicting the path of Super Typhoon Hinnamnor. 

The ministry said on Monday in a statement that Dokdo islets are South Korean territory historically, geographically and by international law.

The ministry stressed that it will sternly respond to Japan’s unjust infringement upon South Korea’s territorial sovereignty, adding it asked the neighboring country to correct the mistake. 

Professor Seo Kyoung-duk at Sungshin Women’s University, first alerted the government and news outlets that Dokdo was labeled as Japanese territory on weather maps posted on the website of the Japan Meteorological Agency. 

KBS World News

You can read more at the link.

It looks like South Korea got very lucky by not getting hit by the worse of Typhoon Hinnamnor:

Super Typhoon Hinnamnor made landfall on Korea’s Geoje early Tuesday morning, possibly becoming the most powerful storm ever to hit the country.

The typhoon, the 11th this year, made landfall at the southeastern city of Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province at 4:50 a.m., according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). Geoje city is made up of a number of islands, of which by far the largest is Geoje Island.

The strength of the typhoon when it hit Geoje was not immediately available, but the KMA said the typhoon was classified “very strong” when it passed through the southern island of Jeju at around midnight with an atmospheric pressure of 945 hectopascals (hPa) at its center and maximum wind speed of 45 kilometers per second.

“Hinnamnor is a very big typhoon with a radius of 400 kilometers, and can carry strong winds and heavy rainfall almost all across the country,” Han Sang-un, the chief forecaster at the KMA, told a press briefing, urging to minimize possible casualties. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but Ulleungdo is the next possible Korean location this typhoon might strike. Hopefully the cooler waters of the East Sea get this typhoon to die down a bit.