North Korea censures planned US-South military drills

North Korea has strongly denounced Washington for plans to conduct a joint military exercise with Seoul next month, as efforts to resume denuclearization negotiations hit numerous impasses.

Kwon Jong Gun at the North's foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency Wednesday that the announcement was equivalent to a "declaration for confrontation" that could jeopardize the diplomatic process.

"We have stressed on several occasions that the joint military drills will force us to reconsider the important steps that we have already taken," Kwon said, adding, "Our patience is reaching an uppermost limit."

Last year, Washington and Seoul canceled the combined air exercise known as Vigilant Ace amid a diplomatic thaw with the North, which considers them a rehearsal for invasion.

But Pentagon spokesman David Eastburn said this week that the US had "no plans to skip upcoming combined exercises" this year.

Army Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn, a Pentagon spokesman, also said Tuesday in Washington that “there were no plans to skip upcoming combined exercises.”

“We are proceeding with the Combined Flying Training Event as planned.”

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The Yonhap News Agency citing some South Korean officials said the drills will be conducted at a smaller scale compared with previous years.

Last year, then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his South Korean counterpart agreed to suspend Vigilant Ace in order "to give the diplomatic process every opportunity to continue" between North and South Korea, the Pentagon said at the time.

In 2017, the US sent its most advanced stealth fighters -- the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- to the Pacific for the event.

A massive force totaling 230 aircraft participated in the US-led drills at Osan Air Base, focusing on security and combat air power, the Air Force said at the time.

Two dozen stealth fighters, including six F-22 twin-engine jets, six F-35A single-engine JSF jets and a dozen F-35B vertical takeoff versions, were present for the aerial training that year. 

Negotiations have been gridlocked since the Hanoi summit between North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-un and US President Donald Trump broke up in February amid disagreement over sanctions relief and what the North would be willing to give up in return.

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Pyongyang also walked away from working-level nuclear talks with Washington in Sweden earlier in October, and has since urged Washington to come forward with a new offer by the end of this year.

Kim has already set the end of 2019 as the deadline for achieving progress in the stalled talks.

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In June 2018, Kim and Trump held their first ever summit in Singapore, where they struck a broadly-worded agreement on working towards denuclearize of the Korean Peninsula, the details of which remain to be hammered out.

The pair also had an unsuccessful February meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Pyongyang has since carried out a series of missile tests, the latest of them last week, when it said it fired a "super-large multiple rocket launcher."

Even though Trump insists that the recurrent tests are not against Pyongyang's pledge to halt all ballistic missile tests as long as negotiations are ongoing, the latest tests did not go down well in US Congress.

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“North Korea is engaged in increasingly escalatory behavior," said Republican Senator Cory Gardner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy, earlier this month.

"This launch and continued North Korean aggression underscore the need for the Trump administration to re-commit to the maximum pressure policy" and for Congress to slap more economic bans against Pyongyang.

The diplomatic process, however, hit a dead end as the US refused to reciprocate a set of measures that Pyongyang took in line with the agreement, including demolishing at least one nuclear test site and agreeing to allow international inspectors into a missile engine test facility.

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