North Korea warns of military action following alleged maritime border incursions

North Korea on Sunday threatened to take action against South Korea over what it claims are violations of the de facto western maritime border, stoking tensions ahead of a trilateral summit in Seoul.

North Korea's top military leaders on Friday ordered its army to take offensive measures against the attack on its sovereignty, North Korean Deputy Defense Minister Kim Kang-il said, according to the North Korean news agency. Korean official press (KCNA).

“We officially warn that we can never tolerate such continued encroachment on our maritime sovereignty and that we can exercise our self-defense power on or under water at any time,” Kim said in a statement carried by KCNA.

The statement came hours before South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol held back-to-back bilateral talks with Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the presidential office.

The three leaders will hold a trilateral summit on Monday. It is the first tripartite summit between Asian countries since December 2019, after a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic and strained relations between Seoul and Tokyo over historical disputes.

Tension remains high along the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the Yellow Sea, the de facto maritime border. North Korea has never recognized the NLL, demanding that it be redrawn further south.

The waters near the NLL have been a flashpoint between the two Koreas, where three bloody naval skirmishes took place in 1999, 2002 and 2009.

In March 2010, Pyongyang torpedoed a South Korean warship near the maritime border, killing 46 sailors on board. In November of the same year, the North bombed the southern border island of Yeonpyeong, killing two civilians and two Marines.

North Korea also accused South Korea and the United States of stepping up hostile aerial espionage, vowing to scatter “mounds of waste paper and trash” across inter-Korean border areas in retaliation for anti- Pyongyang.

For years, North Korean defectors in South Korea and conservative activists have sent balloons carrying leaflets critical of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to North Korea. Pyongyang has chafed at the propaganda campaign, fearing that an influx of outside information could pose a threat to Kim's regime.

North Korea blew up the joint liaison office in the now-shuttered inter-Korean industrial park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong in 2020, angered by Seoul's failure to prevent North Korean defectors from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border. (Yonhap)