North blasts South Korea for military drill with US

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ANKARA - North Korea slammed Seoul on Thursday for joint aerial drills with the U.S. forces.

The statement was carried by state media from Pyongyang against South Korea amid a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia.

The exercises were an "outright challenge" to the Panmunjom Declaration and Pyongyang Joint Declaration, according to the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country (CPRC), a North Korean body promoting the reunification of North and South Koreas.

Both documents had been promulgated in 2018 after respective summits between the leaders of both countries for further denuclearization of North Korea, a peace deal to officially end the Korean War and launch a series of cooperation initiatives.

"[It is] an open violation of the agreement on the military field in which the north and the south committed to make joint efforts for the ease of military tension and removal of hostility," the Korean Central News Agency quoted the statement.

On Monday, South Korea and the U.S. launched a two-week joint aerial military drill around the Korean Peninsula. It is a scaled-back exercise of the massive "Max Thunder drill". Nearly 28,000 U.S. troops have been based on the peninsula since the 1950s.

"The acts of perfidy on the part of the South Korean authorities have greatly disappointed us, as they, far from trying to keep to preserve the valuable spark of peace, reconciliation and cooperation, have gone against the trend toward the reconciliation on the peninsula which the north and the south nurtured by their joint efforts for the past one year," said the CPRC.

Pyongyang called on South Korean authorities to "behave with discretion, mindful that their open perfidy to the DPRK [North Korea] at the crucial moment of whether to preserve the atmosphere of the improvement of the north-south ties may put the overall bilateral ties at risk."