North Korea Warns US–South Korea Drills Threaten Regional Stability

North Korea has sharply criticized the latest joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea, with Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of leader Kim Jong Un, accusing the two allies of undermining stability in East Asia.

In remarks released Tuesday by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim warned that the drills near North Korea’s borders could provoke serious consequences.

“The muscle-flexing of the hostile forces near the areas of our state’s sovereignty and security may cause unimaginably terrible consequences,” Kim Yo Yong said.

“The enemies should never try to test our patience, will and capability,” she added.

“We will watch to what extent the enemy violates the security of our state and what it is playing at,” she continued.

Her comments came a day after the start of the annual Freedom Shield exercises, a 10-day series of joint drills involving about 18,000 US and South Korean troops.

According to United States Forces Korea, the training aims to “enhance the combined, joint, all-domain, and interagency operational environment, thereby strengthening the Alliance’s response capabilities”.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that this year’s Freedom Shield includes 22 field training exercises, a notable reduction compared with the number carried out last year.

Still, Pyongyang framed the drills as inherently confrontational. Kim said there was no justification for the exercises, which Washington and Seoul have long described as defensive.

“No matter what justification they may establish and how the elements of the drill may be coordinated, the clear confrontational nature of the high-intensity large-scale war drill staged by the most hostile entities in collusion at the doorstep of [North Korea] never changes,” she said.

Kim also suggested that the broader global security climate made such exercises more dangerous.

“The recent global geopolitical crisis and complicated international events prove that all military manoeuvres of the field warfare troops, to be conducted by the enemy states, assume no distinction between defence and attack, training and actual warfare,” she said, in an apparent reference to the ongoing US–Israel war with Iran.

The Korean Peninsula has technically remained in a state of war since 1953, when an armistice ended active fighting in the Korean War but never produced a formal peace treaty.

Tensions between the two Koreas have hardened in recent years. In 2024, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared that he would no longer pursue reconciliation with the South, though Seoul continues to maintain that long-term engagement remains a goal.

Despite the strong language, officials in South Korea noted that the statement was relatively restrained compared with previous North Korean responses to allied exercises.

An official from South Korea’s Ministry of Unification told Yonhap that the statement did not explicitly mention the United States or threaten nuclear retaliation.

“Kim appears to have limited her response to merely pinpointing the South Korea-US exercise, taking the current security situation into account,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.