North Korea-China: Kim Jong-un's “militant greetings” to Xi Jinping

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (l.) And Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2018 (illustration image) KCNA VIA KNS / AFP

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This Friday, May 8, North Korea condemned South Korean military maneuvers by saying that the peninsula had returned to the situation of tensions that prevailed before the inter-Korean rapprochement of 2018, while Kim Jong-un, for its part, sent a message to his Chinese ally.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent Chinese President Xi Jinping a diplomatic message to congratulate Beijing on Beijing's " successes  " in fighting the new coronavirus epidemic, the official North Korean  news agency said. Korean KCNA. North Korea has closed its borders to try to protect itself from a pandemic which could be disastrous in a country with notoriously insufficient medical infrastructure. Pyongyang continues to maintain that no case of Covid-19 has been detected on its soil, even as the epidemic has spread to almost the entire globe.

"  Militant greetings  "

Kim told Xi that he was as happy with China's successes as North Korea's, KCNA said, adding that he sent "  militant greetings to each member of the Communist Party of China  ". . Kim's state of health was the subject of intense speculation abroad for several weeks, due to the leader's absence from photos of the April 15 celebrations released by the official press. This date is the most important on the North Korean political calendar because it commemorates the birth of the founder of the regime, Kim Il-sung.

If media outlets around the world have speculated that his health will suddenly deteriorate, or even die, South Korea had quickly indicated that it had no reason to believe these rumors. International negotiations on denuclearization have stalled since the failure of the second summit between Kim and President Donald Trump in February 2019 in Hanoi.

New rant

The inter-Korean relations have cooled considerably since, making forget the three points that had previously met Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. New illustration on Friday, with a rant launched by North Korea against its neighbor to the south after military exercises in the Yellow Sea during the week. "  Everything returned to the starting point, before the North-South summit of 2018,  " said a spokesman for the North Korean Ministry of Defense in a statement released by KCNA. These maneuvers "  remind us again of the obvious fact that the enemy will remain the enemy all the time  ," he added, saying that the situation required "  a necessary reaction on our part  ".

( with AFP )

Also read: Disappearance and reappearance of Kim Jong-un: back on a media frenzy

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  • North Korea
  • China
  • Kim Jong-un
  • Xi Jinping

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