North Korea ramps up criticism against South Korea-U.S. drills, but no mention of missile launch

North Korea's state media on Tuesday ramped up criticism against joint military drills by South Korea and the United States, calling them a "nuclear war exercise," but made no mention of the North's ballistic missile test a day earlier.

North Korea fired what appeared to be multiple close-range ballistic missiles toward the Yellow Sea on Monday, according to South Korea's military, in the North's first ballistic missile test since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

No state news media, including the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), had published a report on the ballistic missile launch as of Tuesday morning.

The KCNA instead published an article on the launch of the joint exercise, Freedom Shield, calling it an "incursive, confrontational war rehearsal."

"It is yet another largest-ever joint military exercise," launched at a time when military drills between the United States and "puppet South Korean military gangsters" were carried out at an unprecedentedly "frantic" level, the KCNA said.

"It clearly reveals who is responsible for worsening the security situation on the Korean Peninsula," it said.

In a separate article, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which caters to general North Korean readers, also denounced the joint military exercise as a "nuclear war exercise" targeting North Korea.

The newspaper accused the allies of "mobilizing various kinds of latest nuclear war equipment, a massive scale of invasion forces and civilians" to carry out the exercise annually across South Korea.

It marks the latest in the North's back-to-back condemnations of the joint exercise. On Monday, the country lambasted it as a "dangerous provocative act."

South Korea and the United States kicked off Freedom Shield on Monday for an 11-day run, involving computer-simulated drills and on-field training, as part of their annual regular exercises to counter threats from North Korea.

For this year's exercise, the two sides plan to stage 16 large-scale on-field drills, up from 10 last year, to strengthen their combined defense posture against North Korean threats and other challenges, including the regime's growing military cooperation with Russia.

Yonhap