North Korea yesterday fired a ballistic missile, Seoul said, resuming a weapons-testing blitz after a month-long lull during the Beijing Winter Olympics, as the world’s attention focuses on Ukraine.
The launch was Pyongyang’s eighth so far this year, including test-firing its most powerful missile since high-profile negotiations between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and then-US president Donald Trump collapsed in 2017.
Diplomacy has languished ever since and despite biting international sanctions, Pyongyang has doubled down on military development, last month threatening to abandon a self-imposed moratorium on firing long-range and nuclear weapons.
Photo: AFP
Analysts had widely predicted that Pyongyang would seek to capitalize on US distraction over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with new tests.
The South Korean military yesterday said that it had detected a ballistic missile fired at 07:52 from Pyongyang toward the Sea of Japan.
“The latest ballistic missile has a range of about 300km and an altitude of about 620km,” it added.
Photo: AFP / KCNA via KNS
Japan confirmed the launch.
South Korea’s presidential Blue House expressed “deep concern and grave regret,” and criticized the timing “when the world is making efforts to resolve the Ukraine war.”
South Korea has said that it would join international economic sanctions against Russia and, as a key US security ally, is closely watching Washington’s response to Moscow’s aggression.
Meanwhile, Pyongyang is “seizing the opportunity” to conduct weapons tests, while “US interests have shifted to Europe over the Ukraine crisis and the UN Security Council is unable to function,” Korea Research Institute for National Strategy researcher Shin Beom-chul said.
North Korea sees this as a perfect moment to “continue its development of necessary weapons and to strengthen its nuclear arsenal,” with a view to being recognized as a nuclear power, he added.
Ukraine, which emerged from the Cold War with sizeable Soviet-era nuclear weapons stocks of its own, gave up its arsenal in the 1990s.
North Korea this weekend accused the US of being the “root cause of the Ukraine crisis,” saying in a statement on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site that Washington “meddled” in the internal affairs of other countries when it suited them, but condemned legitimate “self-defensive measures.”
North Korea is reeling economically from biting sanctions over its weapons programs and a lengthy COVID-19 blockade, but continuing its “ambitious schedule of military modernization” is a top priority, Ewha Womans University professor Leif-Eric Easley said.
“The Kim regime’s strength and legitimacy have become tied to testing ever better missiles,” he added in e-mailed comments.
The pause in testing during the Beijing Winter Olympics was seen as a mark of deference to key diplomatic ally and economic benefactor China.
The latest launch also comes as South Korea gears up to elect its next president on March 9.
Outgoing South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who repeatedly pursued peace talks with North Korea during his five-year term, has said that the situation could easily escalate.
“If North Korea’s series of missile launches goes as far as scrapping a moratorium on long-range missile tests, the Korean Peninsula might instantly fall back into the state of crisis we faced five years ago,” he said in a written interview with international media this month.
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