Tag: North Korea

This hopefully does not come as a surprise to anyone that North Korea has no intention of giving up their nukes:

 North Korea accused U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday of lacking impartiality as head of the global agency, taking issue with his denuclearization-related remarks during a visit to Seoul last week.

In a press statement, Kim Son-gyong, vice foreign minister for international organizations, denounced the U.N. chief for his reported expression of “full support for the complete, verifiable and irretrievable denuclearization (CVID)” of North Korea.

Guterres met with President Yoon Suk-yeol on Friday.

According to an English-language report of the Korean Central News Agency, Kim said, 

“I cannot but express deep regret over the said remarks of the UN secretary-general that grossly lack impartiality and fairness and go against the obligations of his duty, specified in the UN Charter, as regards the issue of the Korean peninsula.” 

“The so-called CVID, touted by the U.S. and its vassal forces, is just an infringement upon the sovereignty of the DPRK as it demands the unilateral disarmament, and Secretary-General Guterres perhaps knows well that the DPRK has totally rejected it without any toleration,” the vice foreign minister added. The DPRK is the acronym for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise is coming up later this month so the Kim regime now the Kim regime is using activist balloons as the excuse they need to launch a provocation:

South Korea’s unification ministry on Thursday voiced strong regret over North Korea’s claim that its COVID-19 outbreak had originated from the South and its threats of an unspecified retaliatory step.

Earlier in the day, Pyongyang’s state media reported that leader Kim Jong-un held a national meeting the previous day and declared victory in the campaign against COVID-19.

During the session, his younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, who serves as vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, reiterated Pyongyang’s assertion that leaflets from the South carried the virus into the North and raised the need to take “deadly retaliatory” countermeasures.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

At this point anyone living along the Imjim River should avoid it during heavy rain periods because the North Koreans are likely going to flood the river with no notification:

 North Korea appears to be releasing water from a dam near the inter-Korean border without giving prior notice to the South, a South Korean government official said Monday, as the North is drenched by heavy downpours.

“As rain has fallen heavily in North Korea, the North is repeatedly opening and closing the floodgates of Hwanggang Dam,” the unification ministry official said. “It seems (the North) is adjusting the Hwanggang Dam’s water level based on the rainfall situation.”

The official said there was no prior notification from the North on the move.

Under an inter-Korean agreement signed in October 2009, the North is supposed to notify the South in advance of its plans to release dam water.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I do not see this many Soldiers being sent to fight in Ukraine by North Korea, but it appears that the Russian propaganda apparatus is trying to will this into existence:

Korotchenko does not cite the source for his claim, which he made in a Thursday, August 4 broadcast, and there does not appear to be any public announcement by Moscow or Pyongyang to support it.

While some Russian outlets have repeated his claims after they were picked up by national and international news outlets, the only earlier mention of such “offer” and the “100,000” figure appears on report by the Russian news agency REGNUM, which the EU has accused of spreading “aggressive and biased propagandist narratives against Ukraine, and to promote a positive attitude to the annexation of Crimea and the actions of separatists in Donbas.”

The article, dated August 2, cites a Russian MP, who referenced North Korea’s “offer” to help in a speech in the Duma.

Newsweek

You can read more at the link, but North Korea has not publicly commented on any of these claims. North Korea definitely has the manpower, but this could be a huge embarrassment for the Kim regime if the Soldiers do not perform well or even worse start defecting. The Russian army has already lost massive prestige by being smacked around by an inferior Ukrainian military.

Part of Kim Jong-un’s deterrence strategy is the prestige of having a massive military that provides a legitimate threat to South Korea. Losing in Ukraine and having a bunch of Soldiers defect takes away from that deterrence factor.

Here is one theory on why the North Koreans have not had a massive loss of life due to COVID despite no vaccination campaign:

Given the two undeniable reports from the North ― that fever cases spiked before falling and that leader Kim Jong-un recently appeared in the middle of a crowd of war veterans without masks ― experts have laid out two scenarios: either that enough North Koreans are now immune to COVID-19, thanks partly to their stronger immune systems, or that most of the fever cases were not COVID-related in the first place.

“North Koreans may have a stronger active immunity, given that they are exposed to all sorts of infectious diseases,” Choi Jung-hoon, a former infectious disease doctor from the North, told The Korea Times. “It is important to keep in mind that its official numbers should not be trusted. If it (herd immunity) was the case, this means that a lot more people died and suffered from COVID-19 in the process than the numbers claim … The progress has also been helped by its draconian measures, which would be politically impossible in democratic countries.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

From the Joong Ang Ilbo:

Four bodies suspected of originating in North Korea have washed up in rivers in Gyeonggi this past month, raising questions about how and why they ended up dead in the South.  
   
The most recent body — of an adult woman — was discovered by a camper in a bush along the Imjin River, downstream from the Gunnam Dam, around 8:25 a.m. on Saturday, according to Yeoncheon Police Precinct.  
   
The source of the Imjin River is north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas and flows through northern Gyeonggi in South Korea before emptying into the Yellow Sea at Ganghwa Island, north of Incheon. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.