North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's younger sister and close aid has lambasted the United States and South Korea for holding military exercises, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday.
In the country's first remarks directed at the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden since it took office in January, Kim Yo Jong called the ongoing 11-day military drills held by the United States and South Korea as a "rehearsal for war" and invasion of the North.
If Seoul becomes more provocative, Pyongyang will take reciprocal measures such as scraping bilateral military agreements designed to ease tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula, Kim Yo Jong said in a statement dated Monday.
She also criticized the new U.S. administration led by Biden for wanting to spread the "smell of gunpowder from across the ocean," urging Washington not to "create work that would prevent it from sleeping in a proper manner" for the next four years.
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Her statement was issued before U.S. foreign and defense chiefs are scheduled to hold security talks with their Japanese and South Korean counterparts on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively.
A senior U.S. government official said Sunday that the Biden administration started reaching out to North Korea from mid-February but has received no response so far.
The U.S. move, conducted through "several channels," including Pyongyang's mission to the United Nations, is aimed at reducing the "risks of escalation," the official said, possibly referring to North Korea's testing of ballistic missiles and nuclear devices.
This year, Washington and Seoul have scaled back their joint military drills amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, and they are carrying out command post exercises centering on computer simulations rather than operational ones involving a large number of troops.
Kim Yo Jong, however, said such military drills target the North and the essence of them has "remained the same."
Biden's predecessor Donald Trump engaged in unprecedented summit diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. The former U.S. president met North Korea's leader three times in 2018 and 2019 in the hopes of convincing the Asian nation to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
But negotiations made little progress during Trump's four years in the White House that ended on Jan. 20 this year, with the two countries at odds over issues such as the degree of sanctions relief Pyongyang should receive for denuclearization steps.
