SEOUL — North Korea fired a ballistic
missile Sunday, Seoul said, resuming a weapons-testing blitz after a month-long
lull during the
Beijing Winter Olympics, with the world’s attention now focused
on Ukraine.
اضافة اعلان
The Sunday launch is Pyongyang’s eighth so far this
year, including test-firing its most powerful missile since high-profile
negotiations between leader Kim Jong Un and then US president Donald Trump
collapsed in 2017.
Diplomacy has languished ever since. And despite
biting international sanctions,
Pyongyang has doubled down on military
development, threatening last month to abandon a self-imposed moratorium on
firing long-range and nuclear weapons.
Analysts had widely predicted Pyongyang would seek
to capitalize on US distraction over Russia’s Thursday invasion of Ukraine with
new tests.
South Korea’s military said Sunday it had detected a
ballistic missile fired towards the Sea of Japan at 07:52 local time (2252 GMT
Saturday) from Pyongyang.
“The latest ballistic missile has a range of around
300 kilometers and an altitude of around 620 kilometers,” it added. Japan also
confirmed the launch.
South Korea’s presidential Blue House expressed
“deep concern and grave regret”, and criticized the timing “when the world is
making efforts to resolve the Ukraine war”.
South Korea has said it will join international
economic sanctions against Russia and, as a key US security ally, is closely
watching Washington’s response to Moscow’s aggression.
Pyongyang, on the other hand, is “seizing the opportunity”
to conduct weapons tests while “the US interest shifted to Europe over the
Ukraine crisis and the UN Security Council unable to function,” Shin Beom-chul,
a researcher at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy, told AFP.
North Korea sees this as a perfect moment to
“continue its development of necessary weapons and to strengthen its nuclear
arsenal”, with a view to being recognized as a nuclear power, he added.
Ukraine, which emerged from the
Cold War with
sizeable Soviet-era nuclear weapons stocks of its own, gave up its arsenal in
the 1990s.
North Korea this weekend accused the United States of being
the “root cause of the Ukraine crisis” saying in a statement on the Foreign
Ministry website that Washington “meddled” in the internal affairs of other
countries when it suited them but condemned legitimate “self-defensive
measures”.
Read more Region and World
.jpg)
.jpg)
