North Korea fired a barrage of ballistic missiles into the sea Thursday, a day after Kim Jong Un’s sister poured cold water on President Donald Trump’s claim that the two leaders had recently been in contact.
The South Korean military detected roughly 10 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Pyongyang area, according to CBS News. The launch followed a pointed statement from Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s influential sister and closest political confidante, carried by state media late Wednesday.
Trump had spent the week touting his “very good relationship” with Kim, sharing a photo from their 2019 meeting and telling reporters Wednesday he expected to sit down with the North Korean leader again this year. He also ordered the Pentagon to slash a major annual joint exercise with South Korea, saying the drills sent a “totally inappropriate and hostile” signal to North Korea.
But Pyongyang was unmoved.
“As for reports coming out of Washington that there has recently been communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I know absolutely nothing about it, and it would probably be the only matter related to our supreme leadership’s foreign policy of which I am unaware,” Kim Yo Jong said, according to The Daily Beast.
She called Trump’s concession “not even worth commenting on” and said scaling back the exercises did not change their “provocative and aggressive” nature.
“If the U.S. side calculates that it can portray the measures it has recently taken as some kind of ‘goodwill gesture,’ it will not get the response it wants,” she added.
Her only olive branch was a note that her brother still holds “fond personal memories and feelings” from his earlier meetings with Trump.
The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, which began this week, will now end Friday, six days ahead of its original schedule, at Trump’s direction.
Trump has pushed aides to arrange a face-to-face with Kim during his planned November trip to Asia, potentially on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China. He met Kim three times during his first term without securing a denuclearization deal.
The appetite for a diplomatic win has grown as his war with Iran, which he predicted would last only a few weeks when it began in February, drags toward the six-month mark with no end in sight.
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