North Korea is conducting new live artillery drills on its west coast, near the maritime border with South Korea, on Sunday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.
Local authorities on remote South Korean islands in the Yellow Sea, near the North Korean coast, told AFP they had sent messages to residents’ mobile phones urging them to stay at home. “North Korean cannon fire is currently being heard,” the messages say.
The South Korean military said the North carried out “artillery fire with more than 90 shells north of Yeonpyeong Island from 4:00 p.m. to 5:10 p.m.” on Sunday, or from 4:00 a.m. to 5:10 a.m. GMT. “We strongly warn against North Korea’s repeated artillery fire in the area where hostile acts are prohibited, which threatens peace on the Korean Peninsula and escalates tensions,” the South’s military said. Korean, demanding “that this stop immediately”.
No North Korean shells fell south of the “Northern Limit Line” (NLL), the de facto maritime border in the Yellow Sea, and no casualties were reported, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. Local authorities in Yeonpyeong told AFP they had warned residents to stay at home as a precaution. On Friday and Saturday, North Korean shots had already targeted the same region, one of the buffer zones created by a 2018 agreement which became obsolete in November after Pyongyang’s launch of a spy satellite.
On Friday, residents of Yeonpyeong and neighboring Baengnyeong Island had already been ordered to evacuate to shelters due to North Korean artillery fire in the surrounding waters. More than 200 shells had been fired, according to Seoul, whose army responded with a live ammunition exercise a few hours later in Yeonpyeong.
A “lure”
Pyongyang claimed that its launches constituted “a natural response and a countermeasure” to the exercises carried out by Seoul, Washington and Tokyo in the region, according to the official KCNA agency. On Saturday, the South Korean military announced that the North had fired 60 shells near Yongpyeong. North Korea, however, provided another version. According to Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, these were explosive charges simulating the sound of a cannon, which the North Korean forces blown up to test the South Korean reaction. “Our army did not fire a single shell into the water,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement broadcast by KCNA on Sunday.
“The rogue ROK military took the lure we set,” she said. Before ironically: “in the future, they will even mistake the rumble of thunder in the northern sky for artillery fire.” Seoul did not immediately react to this assertion.
“Confrontation phase”
This escalation in the Yellow Sea is one of the most serious since 2010, when the North bombed Yeonpyeong, killing four people, including two civilians. It survives after a burst of bellicose declarations from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un who has threatened in recent days to “annihilate” South Korea and the United States. The island of Yeonpyeong, with around 2,000 inhabitants, is located 115 km west of Seoul and around ten kilometers south of the North Korean coast. Also very close to North Korea, Baengnyeong, 4,900 inhabitants, is 210 km from Seoul.
The two Koreas are still technically at war since the end of the conflict in 1953 which ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty. For more than 70 years, the peninsula has experienced alternating periods of heightened tensions and relative relaxation. Their relationship is currently at its lowest point in decades. North Korea “has entered a phase of military confrontation”, Cho Han-bum, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told AFP.
She “will not engage in explicit provocations as she did in Yeonpyeong but will continue to aggravate military tensions” while holding the South responsible. Last year, North Korea enshrined its status as a nuclear power in its constitution and fired several intercontinental ballistic missiles, in violation of UN resolutions. At the end of December, Kim Jong Un ordered the acceleration of military preparations for a “war” that could “start at any time”.
He also ruled out any reconciliation with the South, emphasizing the “persistent and uncontrollable crisis situation” triggered according to him by Seoul and Washington with their joint military exercises in the region.