North Korea fires live artillery at tense border with South for third consecutive day

Kim Jong-un’s firebrand sister Kim Yo-jong mocks South Korea’s military capabilities in statement rejected by Seoul as ‘psychological warfare’

South Korea has urged the North to stop escalating military activity near their shared border after a third consecutive day of live-fire artillery drills.

Seoul warned it would be forced into an “overwhelming response” if North Korea’s provocations continued.

On Sunday, North Korea‘s military fired shots into the sea close to South Korea’s Yeonpyeong island, which lies some 12km off the coast of North Korea in the Yellow Sea to the west of the Korean peninsula.

It comes as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s influential sister Kim Yo-jong issued a statement mocking the South’s military capabilities, denying claims it fired artillery shells into the sea while deriding Seoul’s ability to effectively track its activities.

“Let me be clear once again that our army has its trigger already unlocked,” Ms Kim said, the kind of incendiary rhetoric that has become common from the woman who is widely seen as Kim Jong-un’s second-in-command.

“Our army will immediate launch a baptism of fire in case of even a small provocation,” she said, using the official name of the North Korean army, according to KCNA.

South Korea says the North fired over 60 artillery rounds on Saturday near their disputed maritime border, after a similar volley of over 200 rounds there the previous day.

Ms Kim acknowledged the country fired its artillery on Friday, but said it didn’t fire a single round on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.

She claimed the country only detonated blasting powder, simulating the sound of its coastal artillery, to test the South Korean military’s detection capabilities.

“They misjudged the blasting sound as the sound of gunfire and conjectured it as a provocation. And they even made a false and impudent statement that the shells dropped north of the sea boundary,” she said in her statement on Sunday.

The South Korean military rejected the suggestion that it was misled by the drill and called the North’s statement a form of low-level psychological warfare. It urged the neighbouring country to stop military activity that raises tensions near the border.

People living in South Korean border islands sought cover in bomb shelters on Friday and over the weekend, though there were no reports of shells crossing the border.

South Korea conducted its own live-fire drills in the sea on Friday in response to the artillery shelling, but there appeared to be no immediate plan to do so after Saturday and Sunday’s events.

Tension between the two countries have been on the rise since the North began conducting missile tests with renewed vigour in 2022, while the South expanded its military training with the US in an escalating cycle of events.

Some of the shells launched by the two Koreas in recent drills fell at a maritime buffer zone set up under a 2018 military agreement to ease frontline tensions between the countries.

Experts say this agreement could be in danger of collapsing as measures taken by the countries are in breach of the accord.