Exchange of warning shots between the two Koreas on the maritime border – Le Figaro

Seoul and Pyongyang accuse each other of having breached the disputed maritime border with one of their ships, a new episode in a tense context for a few weeks. The two Koreas exchanged warning shots on Monday morning, accusing each other of having breached the disputed maritime boundary with one of their ships, a new episode in a tense context for a few weeks. First, a North Korean merchant ship breached the said Northern Limit Line, near Baengnyeong Island, at 3:42 a.m. local time and then retreated north after warning shots from the South Korean navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. “The North’s continued provocations and thoughtless claims undermine the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the international community,” the same source said in a statement, urging Pyongyang to “stop them immediately.” “For its part, the Pyongyang army claimed that a South Korean military vessel violated the de facto border of 2.5 to 5 kilometers a few minutes later and the North Korean army (APC) replied by firing ten warning shots at its attention from its west coast. “APC Western Littoral Defense Units took a first countermeasure to powerfully repel the enemy warship by firing 10 multiple rocket launcher rounds towards territorial waters, where an enemy naval movement was detected at 5:15 a.m.,” a spokesman for the APC staff said in a statement. ‘add to artillery fire and broadcast of cross-border messages through loudspeakers,’ said a spokesman for the North Korean army general staff. A half-century of twists and turnsThe maritime “buffer zone” was established during a 2018 agreement intended to prevent tensions between the two Koreas. But they have intensified in recent weeks, with Pyongyang carrying out several missile launches and artillery barrages in the waters of its east and west coasts, targeting this border, deemed provocative by South Korea and Japan. North Korea has also recently ramped up weapons tests described as mock “tactical nuclear” strikes against targets in South Korea. Seoul and Washington expect that Pyongyang, which considers itself threatened by American, South Korean and Japanese military maneuvers in the region, will soon resume its nuclear tests, which would be the seventh. -Korean: At the UN, China blames the United StatesLarge-scale trilateral maneuversTensions have been escalating on the Korean peninsula since the beginning of the year. South Korea recently carried out live-fire exercises and the United States, its main ally, deployed a nuclear aircraft carrier to the region to carry out large-scale trilateral maneuvers also involving Tokyo. Last month, North Korea also declared that its status as a nuclear power was “irreversible”, definitively closing the door to any disarmament negotiations, and let it be known that it authorized itself to carry out preventive strikes in the event of a threat. “The incursion of the merchant ship and the artillery fire from the North demonstrate the lack of consensus on the Northern Limit Line,” Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute, told AFP. “The North could later try to make it obsolete with the backdrop of the confidence it will have, on a military level, in its tactical nuclear arsenal”, according to him. North Korea for ‘nuclear counterattack’ Monday’s warning firefight comes on the day US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman travels to Japan for tripartite talks with Tokyo and Seoul, all two allies of Washington, in a sign of unity after the series of fire from North Korea. Pyongyang claims to be responding to “provocations” from Seoul and described these weapons tests as simulations of “tactical nuclear strikes” against targets in South Korea.