ROK says no decision on joint US exercises

SEOUL/PYONGYANG－The Republic of Korea's Defense Ministry said on Monday that no decision had been made yet on the annual joint military exercises with the United States this summer.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea on Sunday night had urged the ROK to cancel its regular joint military drills with the US, saying a DPRK-ROK summit remains unlikely in the short term, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

On July 27, Seoul and Pyongyang restored their cross-border communication channels that had been severed for over a year, raising expectations for a conciliatory mood between the two neighbors.

On Monday, Boo Seung-chan, the ROK's Defense Ministry spokesman, told an online news conference that nothing was finalized yet over how, when and on which scale the annual ROK-US command post exercise would be conducted, saying it would be decided by the authorities of the two allies. Their combined forces have annually staged the summertime command post drills around mid-August. The DPRK denounces them as a dress rehearsal for invasion.

Boo said Seoul and Washington were in close consultations over the issue taking into account the overall situation, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the combined defense posture and the support for diplomatic efforts to establish lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Lee Jong-joo, a spokeswoman for the ROK's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, said the exercises should not be a "source of military tension in any case", without elaborating.

A senior ROK official said on Friday that the exercises should be postponed to help restart nuclear talks, but Lee declined to comment when asked if the ministry plans to make a formal recommendation.

'Undesirable prelude'

On Sunday, Kim Yo-jong, the DPRK's vice-department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, said: "We view this as an undesirable prelude which seriously undermines the will of the top leaders (of the DPRK and the ROK)." She added that the drill "further beclouds the way ahead of the DPRK-ROK relations".

Seoul and Washington are allies, with the US stationing around 28,500 troops on the Korean Peninsula.

Pyongyang and Seoul remain technically at war after the Korean War (1950-53) was ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

Kim also accused Seoul of "inflating the significance" of last week's restoration of the neighbors' cross-border communication lines.

Those inside and outside the ROK "are freely interpreting" the meaning of restoring communication lines, and "it is a premature hasty judgment" to say that there is a consensus about the issue of the possible summit, she noted.

"What I think is that the restoration of the communication liaison lines should not be taken as anything more than just the physical reconnection," she said, adding that hasty speculation and groundless interpretation will only bring despair.

Xinhua - Agencies