SEOUL: The United States and South Korea have started joint military exercises near the Korean Peninsula on Monday amid heightened tensions across the region.
North Korea has strongly condemned the exercises and threatened to cancel the ceasefire signed in 1953 that brought a three-year conflict with rival South Korea to an end if the South and the US continue with an ongoing military drills.
After the start of the week-long drills on Monday, Pyongyang cut off its hotline with Seoul.
South Korean Defense Ministry Spokesman Kim Min-seok said, “It’s true that North Korea isn’t answering the communication hotline that runs through the Panmunjom at the moment.”
North Korea had cut off the Red Cross hotline, which was installed in 1971, on five occasions in the past, most recently in 2010.
The latest large-scale military exercises involving 3,000 US soldiers and 10,000 South Korea soldiers, come a week after the UN Security Council imposed new sanctions on Pyongyang over its third nuclear test, which was carried out on February 12.
The test last month was the communist country’s third. It followed an apparently successful launch in December of a three-stage rocket, seen as a banned test of missile technology.
DND
