North Korea and South Korea: Exchange of warning shots on the maritime border – 20 Minutes

New tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang. The two Koreas exchanged warning shots on Monday morning, accusing each other of having breached the disputed maritime border with one of their ships, a new episode in a tense context for several weeks. First, a North Korean merchant boat breached the said Northern Limit Line, near Baengnyeong Island, at 3:42 a.m. local time, then reportedly retreated north after warning shots from the southern navy. -Korean, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. “The North’s continued provocations and thoughtless demands 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.” the Pyongyang army claimed that a South Korean military vessel violated the 2.5-5 kilometer de facto border a few minutes later and the North Korean army (APC) responded by firing ten warning shots to his attention from his west coast. “APC Western Littoral Defense Units took a first countermeasure intended to powerfully repel the enemy warship by firing ten multiple rocket launcher shells towards territorial waters, where an enemy naval movement was detected, at 5:15 a.m.,” a spokesman for the APC General Staff said in a statement. ‘Add to artillery fire and cross-border message broadcast over loudspeakers,’ a spokesman for North Korea’s military headquarters said. 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, considered provocative by South Korea and Japan. North Korea has also recently ramped up weapons tests described as simulated “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. Tensions have escalated on the Korean Peninsula since the beginning of the year. South Korea recently conducted live-fire exercises and the United States, its main ally, deployed a nuclear aircraft carrier in the region in order 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. No consensus “The incursion of the merchant ship and the artillery fire from the North demonstrate the lack of consensus regarding the Northern Limit Line,” Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute, told AFP. . “The North may later attempt to nullify it with the backdrop of its military confidence in its tactical nuclear arsenal,” he said. Monday’s exchange of warning shots comes on the day the US Assistant Secretary of State Wendy Sherman travels to Japan for tripartite talks with Tokyo and Seoul, both Washington allies, in a show of unity after the series of fires from North Korea. Pyongyang claims to be responding to “provocations” from Seoul and has described these weapons tests as simulations of “tactical nuclear strikes” against targets in South Korea.