Growing tensions
North Korea wants to permanently cut all transport connections to South Korea

South Korean army soldiers patrol along the barbed wire fence near the border with North Korea
© Ahn Young-joon / AP / DPA
North Korea feels provoked by its southern neighbor and isolates itself. The government in Pyongyang is relying on military deterrence at the border.
North Korea is also responding by stationing strategic US nuclear weapons in the region and South Korean military maneuvers. Pyongyang sees this as a provocation. The aim of the measures is to protect one’s own national security and prevent war. The statement describes South Korea as a “primary enemy state and an immutable principal enemy.”
According to the South Korean military, North Korea has already laid tens of thousands of landmines along the border area in recent months.
Rapprochement policy between North and South Korea is apparently ending completely
The sealing of the already few road and rail connections is primarily a symbolic measure by North Korea, as there has been no direct exchange between the two states across their militarily highly armed national border for several years.
However, this was not always the case: During the rapprochement policy between the two Koreas around the turn of the millennium, North Korea opened the Kaesong special economic zone along the border region, in which South Korean factory owners and North Korean workers produced textiles, among other things. To the east of the border, North Korea also allowed several thousand South Korean visitors to the tourist region along the Diamond Mountains (Korean: “Keumgangsan”).
Meanwhile, tensions on the Korean peninsula and rhetoric have intensified. At the end of 2023, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un described inter-Korean relations as those between two warring states at a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party. He had also demanded that South Korea be designated as the main enemy in the country’s socialist constitution. In recent weeks, Pyongyang has increased its missile tests and nuclear rhetoric.