(United Nations) The United States on Friday denounced the repeated firing of missiles by North Korea which “ridiculously ridicules” the UN Security Council, with the complicity of Russia and China close to Pyongyang.
Posted at 4:43 p.m.
Earlier, the South Korean army announced that it had deployed stealth planes after detecting 180 North Korean fighter jets, a new episode in the spectacular rise in tensions on the Korean peninsula where Seoul and Washington are conducting joint military exercises.
During a meeting without a vote of the Security Council in New York, the American ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused – without naming them – Beijing and Moscow, “two members of this Council of making North Korea benefit from a blanket of protection” and to “give in to justify North Korea’s repeated violations and allow it to ridicule the Council”.
Just before this meeting, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres urged, through his spokesperson, that “North Korea immediately refrain from any act of provocation and fully comply with its obligations arising from Security Council resolutions”.
Confrontation
The UN chief “is deeply concerned about the tensions on the Korean peninsula and the thrust of a rhetoric of confrontation”, insisted his spokesman Stéphane Dujarric.
In fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul claimed that its forces had “detected approximately 180 North Korean fighter jets” mobilized in Pyongyang airspace.
Seoul has “deployed 80 fighter jets, including F-35As”. Planes mobilized for military exercises with the United States are also “ready” to take off, according to the same source.
The joint air drills were extended until Saturday after North Korea reportedly failed to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Thursday.
They are among the largest ever, with hundreds of warplanes involved on either side.
The extension of these exercises is “a very dangerous and bad choice”, castigated the North Korean regime which fired three short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday evening.
Soon after, starting at 11:28 p.m. in Korea on Thursday, the South’s military detected around 80 artillery fire from the North in a maritime ‘buffer zone’ from the Kumkang area of Kangwon province on the coast. east of the country.
This barrage is “a clear violation” of the 2018 inter-Korean agreement which established these buffer zones in order to reduce tensions between the two parties, thundered the South Korean general staff.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has spoken of a “de facto territorial invasion”.
Continuous provocations
Called “Vigilant Storm”, the American-South Korean exercises constitute “an aggressive and provocative military maneuver targeting the People’s and Democratic Republic of Korea”, denounced Wednesday for its part the North Korean regime which has threatened Seoul and Washington with “paying the most horrible price in history”.
North Korea has always viewed U.S.-South Korean military maneuvers as dress rehearsals for an invasion of its territory or an overthrow of its regime.
Analysts attribute Pyongyang’s particularly furious reaction this time around to the use of advanced F-35A and F-35B stealth aircraft during ‘Vigilant Storm’, seen as an ideal tool for carrying out ‘decapitation strikes’ flash against North Korean leaders.
North Korea had already, in September, revised its nuclear doctrine to allow itself to carry out preventive strikes in the event of an existential threat against the Kim Jong-un regime.
If North Korea’s nuclear “command and control system” is “endangered by an attack by hostile forces, a nuclear strike will be launched automatically and immediately,” the new doctrine says.
Seoul and Washington have been warning for months that North Korea is about to carry out a nuclear test, which would be its seventh.
The South Korean army will also proceed next week with its annual “Taegeuk” exercise intended to “improve wartime performance” and crisis management.
It is a computer-simulated exercise conducted to build “the ability to conduct practical missions in anticipation of various threats such as nuclear weapons, missiles and recent provocations by North Korea”, according to the military. South Korean.