North Korea fired a suspected ballistic missile on Sunday, military officials in South Korea and Japan said, in the first test since the nuclear-armed country conducted a record number of launches in January, Insider reports.
Sunday’s missile flew to an altitude of around 390 miles and a range of 190 miles. Japan’s Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said that this launch was part of “frequent launches” since the beginning of the year. It said that North Korea was threatening the security of Japan and the international community, Reuters reported.
“If North Korea deliberately carried out the missile launch while the international community is distracted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, such an act is absolutely unforgivable,” he told reporters, according to AP. “Whatever the motives are, North Korea’s repeated missile launches are absolutely inexcusable and we cannot overlook considerable missile and nuclear advancement.”
South Korean officials said they detected the launch from the North’s capital area and expressed “deep concerns and grave regret” over it. During an emergency National Security Council meeting, top South Korean officials said the timing of the launch, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “is not desirable at all for peace and stability in the world and on the Korean Peninsula,” the presidential Blue House said.
The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command later Sunday condemned the launch and called on North Korea to refrain from further destabilizing acts. A statement said the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea and Japan “remains ironclad,” though Sunday’s launch didn’t pose an immediate threat to U.S. territory and that of its allies.
The launch came a day after North Korea made its first response to the Ukraine war in the form of an article by a government analyst that expressed support for Russia and slammed the United States. “The basic cause of the Ukraine incident lies in the high-handedness and arbitrariness of the United States,
which has ignored Russia’s legitimate calls for security guarantees and only sought a global hegemony and military dominance while clinging to its sanctions campaigns,” Ri Ji Song, a researcher at a North Korean state-run institute on international politics, said in a post published on the website of the Foreign Ministry.
