On Monday, North Korea attacked South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, calling him a “diplomatic moron” for using a U.N. speech to warn about the North’s developing military relations with Russia. NoKo also said the South’s President is “a guy with a trash brain.”
Yoon warned the United Nations General Assembly last week that they would not sit idly by if North Korea and Russia agreed to arms deals that might threaten South Korea.
The international community is worried that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may try to negotiate the transfer of advanced nuclear and weapons technologies to his country in exchange for Russia restocking its conventional arms inventory, which was depleted during the conflict with Ukraine.
The official North Korean news agency KCNA wrote in an editorial that “puppet traitor Yoon” at the 78th U.N. General Assembly slandered the relations between North Korea and Russia.”
KCNA claimed it’s “very natural” and a “legitimate right” for countries close to maintain tight connections but didn’t address concerns about a prospective weapons agreement with Russia.
North Korea’s “substandard system that lacks basic manners and common sense,” as one South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman put it, was on full display in the KCNA insults.
Meanwhile, North Korea is angry at Yoon’s efforts to enhance South Korea’s military cooperation with the United States. The news agency claimed that Yoon was “voluntarily functioning as a subservient trumpeter and loudspeaker for the U.S.” in a KCNA dispatch from Monday.
Off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula, the South Korean and American fleets started three days of combined naval maneuvers on Monday to enhance their joint operational capacity. Military drills between South Korea and the United States are seen as invasion rehearsals by North Korea, prompting the latter to respond with its missile testing.
Suppose Russia and North Korea proceed with weapons transfer arrangements in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions that forbid such trade. In that case, the United States and South Korea have threatened them with unspecified consequences. Russia supported these resolutions as one of the Security Council’s permanent members.
The leaders of South Korea and the United States are frequent targets of North Korea’s crass insults. It referred to former South Korean leaders Lee Myung-bak as “a rat” and Park Geun-hye as “a prostitute.” Ex-President Trump was branded “a mentally unstable U.S. dotard,” while Obama was compared to a monkey.
