The South Korean military fired warning shots after about 20 North Korean soldiers crossed their shared border, escalating tensions as the “balloon war” intensified, South Korean media reported.
South Korea’s Joint Staff said the North Korean soldiers crossed the military demarcation line at 12:30 p.m. local time on Sunday but returned after firing warning shots.
The soldiers crossed the land border to perform an “unspecified task” within the Demilitarised Zone, which designates a 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone between the two Koreas, Yonhap news agency quoted military spokesman Colonel Lee Sung-jun as saying.
However, it did not appear that they crossed the border deliberately, Colonel Lee said, noting that it was a wooded area and demarcation marks were not clearly visible.
The incursion came after Pyongyang warned of “new opposition” after South Korea resumed broadcasting over loudspeakers and activists distributed propaganda leaflets across the border into North Korea.
The war with balloons and propaganda
The neighbours have been waging psychological warfare since the Korean War in the 1950s, flying propaganda balloons and using radio broadcasts and loudspeakers to influence each other’s citizens, promoting their ideologies and social systems and encouraging soldiers to defect.
Earlier, on June 9, it became known that the DPRK again launched balloons with rubbish and dung into South Korea. More than 80 balloons landed on the territory of South Korea.
On June 6, South Korea retaliated against the DPRK, which in late May sent balloons with rubbish. The South sent balloons containing Korean doramas (TV series) and K-pop on USB sticks to the North.
On June 4, South Korea decided to fully suspend the 2018 inter-Korean agreement made to ease tensions. Last November, Seoul partially suspended the pact after Pyongyang said it had successfully launched a military satellite for the first time.
Before that, on June 2, the DPRK explained the launch of a dung balloon towards South Korea. North Korea is known to have launched balloons with rubbish in response to Seoul’s distribution of propaganda leaflets.
