The United States denounced Friday the repeated firing of missiles by North Korea which “ridiculously ridicules” the Security Council of the UNwith the complicity of Russia and China close to Pyongyang. 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 tension on the Korean peninsula where Seoul and Washington conduct joint military exercises.
During a Security Council meeting without a vote in New York, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused, without naming them, Beijing and Moscow, “two members of this Council, of allowing North Korea to benefit from 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”.
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.
Planes “ready” to take off
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”. The planes mobilized for military exercises with the United States are also “ready” to take off, according to the same source.
These joint aerial exercises have been extended until Saturday after the apparently failed launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday (ICBMs) by North Korea. 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 in Kangwon province on the east coast of South Korea. 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.
Pyongyang fired about 30 missiles on Wednesday and Thursday, including one that ended its course near southern territorial waters for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol spoke of a “de facto territorial invasion”.