A North Korean soldier crossed the inter-Korean border on Tuesday, South Korean authorities said, amid a summer of heightened tensions on the peninsula and as the US and South Korea conduct joint military exercises.
The South Korean armed forces said they had “secured custody” of the soldier and that he had been handed over to the relevant authorities to establish his intentions. South Korean media reports described him as a staff sergeant in the North Korean army.
The risky crossing, which occurred at the easternmost point of the heavily fortified demilitarised zone, marked the second possible North Korean defection to the South this month, after a civilian crossed a maritime border off the west coast in the first week of August.
The crossings come as tensions and rhetoric have escalated on the Korean peninsula this summer. Pyongyang has sent waves of waste-carrying balloons over the border in apparent retaliation against a leafleting campaign by human rights campaigners in South Korea.
The balloons have repeatedly disrupted South Korea’s busiest airport and one landed inside the South Korean president’s compound. Seoul responded last month by using loudspeakers to blast propaganda messages and K-pop into the North.
Last week, South Korea’s conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol told an event marking Korea’s independence from Japanese rule that “the freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North, where people are deprived of freedom and suffer from poverty and starvation”.
“Only when a unified, free and democratic nation rightfully owned by the people is established across the entire Korean peninsula will we finally have complete liberation,” Yoon added, in remarks widely interpreted as a threat to pursue a renewed policy of unification through absorption of the North.
On Sunday, North Korea hit back by describing the latest US-South Korea military exercises as a “prelude to nuclear war”. The regime also accused the US of threatening to trigger a “third world war” by supporting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pursued closer economic and military ties with Russia and has backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, including supplying munitions, in moves that have alarmed the US and its western allies.
Analysts noted that tensions on the peninsula worsened earlier this year after Kim renounced his country’s long-standing commitment to eventual unification, describing South Korea as his country’s “principal enemy” and saying its citizens should no longer be regarded as “fellow countrymen”.
North Korea has also worked with China to reinforce the country’s northern border, across which the majority of North Koreans seeking to claim citizenship in the South cross.
In the first half of the year, just 105 North Korean escapees arrived in South Korea. The majority were women who had already spent years in China, many of them victims of human trafficking networks. That figure compares with an average of 1,000 North Koreans arriving in the South each year before the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Ri Il Gyu, a former North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba who defected to the South last year, Kim’s crackdown on the border and his abandonment of the goal of unification was a response to the desire of many North Koreans to move to or to join the South.
“North Koreans long for and desire unification more than South Koreans,” he told South Korea’s conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper last month.
“Whether they are executives or ordinary citizens, when they worry about the future of their children, they think that there has to be a better life, and the only answer is unification.”