Tag: North Korea

This is all part of North Korea’s strategy to pressure the U.S. to drop sanctions:

North Korea said Monday leader Kim Jong Un urged officials to overcome a “grim situation” facing the country and make stronger efforts to improve the food and living conditions of his people. 

But state media didn’t mention any specific comments toward Washington and Seoul while reporting on Kim’s speech marking the 76th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party’s founding.

Nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled for more than two years over disagreements in exchanging the release of crippling U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea and the North’s denuclearization steps.

The country has ramped up its missile testing activity in recent weeks while making conditional peace offers to Seoul, reviving a pattern of pressuring South Korea to get what it wants from the United States.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link, but Kim Jong-un is inferring that the U.S. is responsible for the poor living conditions of his people. He is trying to make the case that dropping sanctions is a humanitarian issue. However all of us who follow North Korea issues know when sanctions were dropped in the past it was used to further develop their ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Why would this time be any different?

President Moon needs to be telling the Kim regime there is no need for confrontation and not the rest of us because they are the ones that have shelled a civilian island, sunk the Cheonan with a torpedo, kidnapped Korean citizens, and the list goes on and on:

President Moon Jae-in said that there is “no reason for confrontation” between the two Koreas Tuesday, a day after the restoring of cross-border hotlines, stressing the importance of co-prosperity with the North.    
   
“From the perspective of overseas Koreans, a Korea divided in two, into the South and the North, must be a sad reality,” said Moon, speaking at a ceremony marking 15th World Korean Day. “But we have no reason for confrontation. Competition over political systems and comparison of national power has long since become meaningless.”  
   
The two Koreas restored cross-border communication lines Monday, 55 days after Pyongyang suspended them to protest a military exercise, taken by the South as a positive signal to deescalate tensions and improve inter-Korean relations.    
   
“Now, it is even more important to prosper together,” continued Moon. “Even if unification takes time, the South and North can cooperate and get along well with each other.”   

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but as I have said before with Moon presidency ending soon the Kim regime knows that their window of opportunity to get sanctions dropped is shrinking. Thus they are being nice to President Moon while at the same time trying to pressure the Biden administration to deal with them by executing missile tests. I would expect the provocations to escalate if the Kim regime feels they are not making progress towards an agreement with the Biden administration.

While the ROK was cutting military drills with the U.S., the Kim regime was actually increasing theirs:

Most of North Korea’s naval drills involving submarines in the past seven years took place in 2018, even as the two Koreas held talks three times to defuse tensions, Rep. Han Ki-ho of the opposition People Power Party said Tuesday, citing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military found that the North deployed its submarines to rehearse attacks on the South about 150 times in 2018, the highest number since 2014, when such drills took place about 120 times. Excluding 2018 from 2015 to 2019, Pyongyang held the drill 87 times a year on average. 

No drills took place in 2020 because of the pandemic, according to the military.

But the 2018 drills were not made public at the time, and since 2018, South Korea has cut back on its own naval drills with the US to counter North Korean submarines.

The Navy held submarine drills with the US only eight times, spending two weeks in total running them in 2018, while in 2016, the allies spent a little over a month holding them.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

As we have been saying here on the ROK Drop, Kim Jong-un is eager to pressure the Moon administration to get a deal cut with Biden administration before the ROK presidential elections this Spring. If a conservative takes power in South Korea the Kim regime knows they have little prospects of getting a deal that gives them what they want with little to nothing in return. The time to get a deal in their favor is now, so expect continued missile tests to keep North Korea in the headlines and the pressure on the Biden administration.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said Wednesday he will restore inter-Korean hotlines early next month, while calling Washington’s outreach to Pyongyang for dialogue “a petty trick.”  
   
“The U.S. is touting ‘diplomatic engagement’ and ‘dialogue without preconditions’ but it is no more than a petty trick for deceiving the international community and hiding its hostile acts and an extension of the hostile policy pursued by the successive U.S. administrations,” Kim said in a speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly on Wednesday, according to an English-language statement carried by the North’s official Korea Central News Agency (KCNA).    
   
It was the first time that Kim directly responded to the Joe Biden administration’s repeated calls for dialogue “without any preconditions.”  
   
Kim spoke in a more conciliatory tone about the South, in what appeared to be an attempt to pressure Seoul to get the Joe Biden administration to ease crippling sanctions, suspend joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, or allow it to keep its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles – the list of items that the regime has repeatedly demanded from Seoul and Washington.   

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

If they did test a hypersonic missile experts are saying it is in a very early developmental stage. However, as we have seen with their ICBM program they can make gains pretty quickly with repetitive testing. This may be an indication that they plan to do more upcoming testing as part of provocation cycle to pressure the Biden administration to give them what they want:

North Korea’s newly unveiled “hypersonic missile” appears to be at an early stage of development and can be intercepted by South Korean and U.S. military assets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said Wednesday.

The assessment came hours after the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the country’s Academy of Defense Science conducted the first test fire of the hypersonic Hwasong-8 missile from Toyang-ri, Jagang Province, on Tuesday.

“Given the detected speed and other features of the ‘hypersonic missile’ North Korea said it test-fired yesterday, it appears to be at an early stage of development that would require considerable time for actual deployment,” the JCS said in a statement. 

The North’s missile reportedly flew at a speed of around Mach 3, though the military declined to confirm details, including its flight range and altitude.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest on North Korea’s recent missile launch:

The Japanese government says North Korea appears to have fired one ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan early on Tuesday. Shortly after the launch, a North Korean diplomat rose to speak at the United Nations and called on the US to scrap its hostile policy against the country.

The South Korean military says it believes the North fired a short-range missile from the northern part of the country toward its east coast. It says it’s collecting and analyzing information together with the US military.

Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide said, “The Japanese government is on high alert and monitoring the situation. We are also analyzing how the launch was conducted.”

Japanese government officials say it is unlikely the suspected ballistic missile has fallen inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but the launch was timed to happen before Kim Song the North Korean ambassador to the U.N. gave a speech about the self defensive nature of their weapons program.