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A North Korean soldier crossed the inter-Korean border on Tuesday, South Korean authorities stated, amid a summer time of heightened tensions on the peninsula and because the US and South Korea conduct joint army workouts.
The South Korean armed forces stated that they had “secured custody” of the soldier and that he had been handed over to the related authorities to ascertain his intentions. South Korean media experiences described him as a employees sergeant within the North Korean military.
The dangerous crossing, which occurred on the easternmost level of the closely fortified demilitarised zone, marked the second attainable North Korean defection to the South this month after a civilian crossed a maritime border off the west coast within the first week of August.
The crossings come as tensions and rhetoric have escalated on the Korean peninsula this summer time. Pyongyang has despatched waves of waste-carrying balloons over the border in obvious retaliation towards a leafleting marketing campaign by human rights campaigners in South Korea.
The balloons have repeatedly disrupted South Korea’s busiest airport and one landed contained in the South Korean president’s compound. Seoul responded final month by utilizing loudspeakers to blast propaganda messages and Ok-pop into the North.
Final week, South Korea’s conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol informed an occasion marking Korea’s independence from Japanese rule that “the liberty we get pleasure from should be prolonged to the frozen kingdom of the North, the place individuals are disadvantaged of freedom and endure from poverty and hunger”.
“Solely when a unified, free and democratic nation rightfully owned by the folks is established throughout the complete Korean peninsula will we lastly have full liberation,” Yoon added, in remarks broadly interpreted as a risk to pursue a renewed coverage of unification by means of absorption of the North.
On Sunday, North Korea hit again by describing the most recent US-South Korea army workouts as a “prelude to nuclear battle”. The regime additionally accused the US of threatening to set off a “third world battle” by supporting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
North Korean chief Kim Jong Un has pursued nearer financial and army ties with Russia and has backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s battle in Ukraine, together with supplying munitions, in strikes which have alarmed the US and its western allies.
Analysts famous that tensions on the peninsula worsened earlier this 12 months after Kim renounced his nation’s long-standing dedication to eventual unification, describing South Korea as his nation’s “principal enemy” and saying its residents ought to now not be thought to be “fellow countrymen”.
North Korea has additionally labored with China to strengthen the nation’s northern border, throughout which the vast majority of North Koreans looking for to assert citizenship within the South cross.
Within the first half of the 12 months, simply 105 North Korean escapees arrived in South Korea. The bulk have been girls who had already spent years in China, lots of them victims of human trafficking networks. That determine compares with a mean of 1,000 North Koreans arriving within the South annually earlier than the coronavirus pandemic.
Based on Ri Il Gyu, a former North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba who defected to the South final 12 months, Kim’s crackdown on the border and his abandonment of the purpose of unification was a response to the will of many North Koreans to maneuver to or to affix the South.
“North Koreans lengthy for and want unification greater than South Koreans,” he informed South Korea’s conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper final month.
“Whether or not they’re executives or bizarre residents, after they fear about the way forward for their kids, they assume that there must be a greater life, and the one reply is unification.”
