The joint annual military exercises between South Korea and the United States will be more intense this year due to threats from North Korea.
The United States and South Korea have launched one of the largest annual joint military exercises, which is expected to raise tensions in North Korea, which at the beginning years threatened to destroy its southern neighbor.
Bloomberg writes about this.
Exercise Freedom Shield, which runs from Monday, March 4, through March 14, includes land, sea and air training with an emphasis on countering nuclear operations, the Korean military said. US forces. It is also the first large-scale joint exercise since political differences led the two Koreas to end a 2018 agreement aimed at reducing tensions along their heavily armed border.
According to Yonhap News and other South Korean media, the US may send an aircraft carrier group and strategic bombers to participate in the exercise. Kim Jong Un's regime has resisted the deployment of U.S. nuclear-capable capabilities to the region for years, and Pyongyang threatened to use its powerful weapons in October when the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier group to South Korea.
North Korea has a tendency to time provocations to coincide with general exercises, and the Freedom Shield came after Kim said last month that he had the legal right to destroy South Korea. He began the year by ruling out the concept of peaceful unification from his state's national policy and conducting artillery drills off a South Korean island near the maritime border that has been the scene of deadly conflicts in the past.
This has led to speculation that Kim has turned back his bellicose attacks and is preparing for battle. US President Joe Biden warned Kim that an attempted nuclear attack would mean the end of his regime.
South Korean President Yoon Seok-yol's government has said it believes North Korea will try to boost its authority ahead of parliamentary elections in April. Yun's conservative People's Power Party, which supports military cooperation with the United States and a tough stance towards Pyongyang, is trying to wrest control of this body from the opposition Democratic Party, which advocates rapprochement with North Korea.
In December, a North Korean Defense Ministry spokesman called the large-scale military exercise “an open declaration of nuclear confrontation that will make the use of nuclear weapons against the DPRK a fait accompli,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. , which refers to North Korea by its official name.
“The DPRK armed forces are carefully neutralizing the attempt of the United States and its vassal forces to spark a nuclear war,” KCNA quotes a statement from the speaker, whose name he does not name.
Recall, Kim shows no desire to return to stalled nuclear disarmament negotiations and has deployed a series of new weapons designed to launching nuclear strikes on the United States and its allies in Asia. The US, South Korea and Japan have accused him of sending ammunition to Russia to help it in the war in Ukraine in exchange for aid helping the North Korean economy and military.
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