North Korea launches ballistic missile

North Korea launched a close-range ballistic missile and other weapons toward the sea on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, days after the leaders of Russia and China voiced their opposition to Western pressures on North Korea.

The missile fired from Jongju, a city near the North’s west coast, flew about 80 kilometres (50 miles), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. North Korea launched other kinds of projectiles, it said, but didn’t elaborate.

South Korean media, citing the military, reported that the other weapons systems mobilised included multiple rocket launch systems. The reports said that the simultaneous launches of different kinds of weapons were likely meant to test the ability to evade South Korean and US defences.  South Korea’s military said that it closely monitors activities in North Korea. It said that South Korea, with a solid alliance with the US, maintains a readiness to repel any provocations by North Korea.

It was North Korea’s first weapons launch event since April 19, when the country fired multiple short-range missiles in what state media described as a demonstration of cluster bomb warheads.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals since his nuclear diplomacy with US President Donald Trump collapsed in 2019. In recent years, Kim has expanded ties with Russia by sending troops and conventional arms to support its war efforts against Ukraine. Kim has also pushed to cement cooperation with China, North Korea’s economic pipeline.  In their summit in Beijing last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed their opposition to “foreign policy isolation, economic sanctions, military pressure and other methods of creating threats to the security” of North Korea, according to a statement from the Kremlin.