North Korea’s Kim Jong Un orders troops to carry out drill near sea border
The move was rebuked by South Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his troops to practice firing artillery near a disputed sea boundary with rival South Korea, Pyongyang’s state media reported, drawing a quick rebuke from Seoul.
It was the latest sign of impatience from Mr Kim amid worries that nearly two years of US-North Korean diplomacy will fall apart if Washington does not meet Pyongyang’s year-end deadline to offer a new initiative to settle their long-running standoff over the North’s nuclear weapons programme.
The coastal artillery company’s actions during Mr Kim’s visit to the west coast’s Changrin Islet “fully showed their gun firing skills” and “delighted the supreme leader”, according to the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
It did not say when the visit took place, and it was not clear what specific weapons were fired.
Those once-promising negotiations are largely at a standstill now as North Korea steps up pressure on Washington to lift international sanctions and abandon what it calls hostile policies against the North.
When North Korea has previously spoken of removing US hostility, it has meant the presence of tens of thousands of US troops stationed in South Korea and Japan.
Mr Kim is believed to want a deal that provides relief from crippling sanctions against his country in return for disarmament moves that critics say would come too slowly and would not significantly roll back his nuclear programme.
The islet where the recent drills took place is just north of the de facto inter-Korean maritime boundary, the scene of several bloody naval skirmishes between the rivals.
In 2010, North Korea launched an artillery strike on a South Korean island just south of the boundary, killing four people.
Earlier that year, North Korea is accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship operating near the boundary, killing 46 sailors.
South Korea’s defence ministry expressed regret over the latest drills, saying they violated deals settled between the Koreas last year that looked to lower military animosities along the border.
Relations between the two Koreas improved greatly last year as Mr Kim engaged in talks with the US over the fate of his advancing nuclear arsenal.
Mr Kim met President Donald Trump in Singapore in June last year in what was the first such North Korea-US summit since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Mr Kim also met South Korean President Moon Jae-in three times last year.
The nuclear talks fell apart in February, when Mr Trump rebuffed Mr Kim’s calls for broad sanctions relief in return for dismantling his main nuclear complex, a partial denuclearisation step.
Inter-Korean relations have subsequently suffered a series of setbacks, with North Korea criticising South Korea for failing to break away from Washington and for not restoring joint economic projects held up by UN sanctions.
North Korea has also threatened to dismantle South Korean-built buildings at a now-shuttered joint tourism project in the North.
North Korea has not lifted a self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests, which Mr Trump has boasted as his major achievement in his North Korea policy.
But Mr Kim has demanded Mr Trump come up with new, acceptable proposals to salvage the nuclear negotiations by year’s end.
Observers worry that a failure to do so could see a return to the weapons tests of 2017 that had many fearing war.
