North Korea Steps up Its Hostile Moves Against South Korea

Last month, North Korea accused South Korea of flying drones carrying anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets into its capital, Pyongyang. According to Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), one of the North’s main state-controlled media outlets, South Korean drones were detected on October 3, October 9, and October 10.

On October 11, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, threatened that the South would face a “terrible calamity” if its drones were detected in Pyongyang again.

The South Korean Defense Ministry denied the accusation, adding it cannot confirm whether the North’s claims were true. However, Pyongyang seems to have concluded that it is time to reactivate provocations against Seoul.

“We secured clear evidence that the ROK military gangsters are the main culprit of the hostile provocation of violating the sovereignty of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea by intruding into the sky over its capital city,” Kim said. (ROK is an acronym of the South’s official name, Republic of Korea, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the North’s official name.) However, North Korea has not detailed what the evidence is.

On October 13, KCNA reported that its front-line army units are on standby to launch strikes on South Korea if drones fly toward the North again. That marks a major escalation in the ongoing leaflet war.

In recent months, the North has launched trash-carrying balloons across the border in response to the launches of balloons carrying anti-North Korean leaflets and USB sticks with K-pop songs and K-dramas by a group of North Korean defectors in South Korea. Pyongyang has blamed the South Korean government for failing to choke off the defectors’ balloon launches toward North Korea, saying it has no choice but to take countermeasures.

According to KCNA, Kim Jong Un presided over a meeting with his defense and security officials on October 14 to discuss his potential measures against the South’s accused drone launches. No specific measures were outlined in the report, but it said Kim “set forth the direction of immediate military activities.”

As North Korea ramped up its threats against South Korea, the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it ordered military units to strengthen surveillance and vigilance over North Korea while taking a strong readiness posture.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have steadily increased since the collapse of the North Korea-U.S. negotiations in 2019. North Korea failed to induce then-U.S. President Donald Trump to lift the devastating economic sanctions against the country, culminating in the failure of the Kim-Trump summit in Hanoi.

A year later, in 2020, North Korea demolished the inter-Korean liaison office that was located in Kaesong, north of the Demilitarized Zone. Pyongyang claimed the move was retaliation against the balloon launches made by a group of North Korean defectors living in South Korea. However, many South Korean analysts believed that the North blew up the liaison office to convey its anger against the South. As then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in was the one who initiated a peace process on the Korean Peninsula and advised Kim to have a meeting with Trump, Kim may have blamed Moon for the embarrassing failure of the Hanoi summit. Many experts viewed the North’s demolition of the liaison office as a message to Moon.

Since then, North Korea has continued to sever links to the South. On October 9, Pyongyang notified the United Nations Command of its plans to cut off roads and railway that connect the two Koreas. On October 15, it blew up parts of the inter-Korean roads, according to the South Korean military.

In response, the South Korean military fired warning shots in areas south of the Military Demarcation Line. The South Korean Unification Ministry also condemned Pyongyang’s moves to sever road links with the South.

When asked about the North’s bombing of inter-Korean roads, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller urged North Korea to “reduce tensions and cease any actions that would increase the risk of conflict.” He encouraged Pyongyang to “return to dialogue and diplomacy.”

As the North also plans to fortify the inter-Korean borders, more developments are expected in the coming weeks. All these measures are a follow-up to Kim Jong Un’s anti-unification stance, which was introduced during a key political meeting in December 2023. 

Scrapping his father and grandfather’s decades-long goal to reunify the Korean Peninsula under the autocratic Kim family regime, Kim Jong Un has made clear that he views South Korea as a “hostile” state. Since then, North Korea has scrubbed all references to unification or a common Korean ethnicity by demolishing monuments, rewriting textbooks, and re-editing old propaganda footage and films. The severing of road links and fortification of the border is the most visible aspect of this policy.

“The very concepts of unification, reconciliation, and a shared minjok [ethnic heritage] must be eliminated,” Kim ordered in January. 

Ironically, according to surveys, the younger generations in South Korea also are pessimistic about the idea of unifying with North Korea, given the divergent economic, ideological, and social systems between the two Koreas.

In practice, North Korea lost the unification competition with South Korea decades ago, due to a crippled economy caused by its obsession with developing illicit nuclear weapons. Kim likely chose to abandon his country’s unification policy to consolidate his power amid food shortages, economic crises, and climate-related disasters. He might have been concerned that South Korea would pursue unification through absorption so that his family would not be able to run the country in the end.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s unification doctrine, introduced on August 15, is exactly what Kim fears. Yoon’s approach is based on “changing the minds of the North Korean people to make them ardently desire a freedom-based unification.”

Even more concerning for Kim, interviews with North Koreans show their support for unification was largely driven by the hope of experiencing the prosperity and freedoms of the South – not by a wish to “liberate” their southern brethren from what North Korea calls a “puppet regime.”

Kim seems to have abandoned the unification policy as a means to retain his dictatorship and ensure that power would pass to one of his children in the future. At the same time, he is seeking a new survival strategy for his regime – not for the sake of his country. North Korea’s new partnership with Russia is a major piece of Kim’s plan.

Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin have visited each other’s countries to demonstrate their willingness to strengthen military cooperation. Most notably, North Korea has provided ammunition to Russia to fight its war in Ukraine. Recently, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused North Korea of sending troops to Ukraine to support the Russian army.

On October 15, Kyiv Post, a Ukrainian media outlet, said that North Korea is not only sending weapons and military equipment but also supplying personnel. “The battalion is expected to include up to 3,000 North Korean troops and is currently being supplied with small arms and ammunition,” the Kyiv Post reported, citing sources in Ukraine’s military intelligence.

Miller, the U.S. State Department spokesperson, said in a briefing on October 15 that if the North is sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine on side of Russia, it would indicate “a new level of desperation” by Russia as “it continues to suffer significant casualties on the battlefield.”

North Korea has a history of provocations taken ahead of previous U.S. presidential elections and a preference for achieving a dramatic effect through its eye-catching military activities. Among a range of provocations it can make, some experts have warned that the North could conduct a seventh nuclear test.

Even absent a nuclear test, in the coming weeks, North Korea will likely make more moves that will destabilize the Korean Peninsula further. Possibilities include test-launches of long-range ballistic missiles and short-range ballistic missiles, perhaps even another attempted launch of a military spy satellite.

In South Korea, Yoon’s conservative administration will not sit by but will make an active tit-for-tat response against every single move made by the North.

All this comes at a time when no dialogue or communication channels are working between the countries.