SEOUL – North Korea fired an artillery barrage near two South Korean border islands on Friday, Seoul’s defense ministry said, prompting a live-fire exercise by the South Korean military.

Residents of both islands were ordered to evacuate and ferries were suspended as South Korea held a live-fire exercise following the North’s barrage – one of the worst military escalations on the peninsula since Pyongyang fired shells at one of the islands in 2010.

Friday’s live firing followed repeated warnings from Kim Jong Un’s regime in Pyongyang that it was prepared for war against South Korea and the United States.

Seoul’s defense ministry said the North Korean military fired “over approximately 200 rounds” of artillery shells on Friday morning near Yeonpyeong and Baengnyeong, two sparsely populated South Korean islands that lie just south of a de facto maritime border between the two sides.

The shells landed in the so-called buffer zone along the border, created by a 2018 tension-reducing deal that collapsed in November after the launch of Kim’s spy satellites.

The resumption of artillery fire inside the buffer zone “is a provocative act that threatens peace on the Korean Peninsula and escalates tensions,” said Seoul Defense Minister Shin Won-sik.

In response to Pyongyang’s actions, Seoul’s military will take “immediate, strong and definitive retaliation – we must support peace with overwhelming force,” he added.

Pyongyang’s main ally and patron China called for “restraint” from all sides on Friday.

“We hope that all relevant parties will maintain calm and restraint, refrain from taking actions that increase tensions, prevent further escalation of the situation and create conditions for the resumption of meaningful dialogue,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters .

Evacuation orders

Yeonpyeong has around 2,000 residents and is located about 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of the South Korean capital Seoul.

Baengnyeong, with its 4,900 residents, is located about 210 kilometers west of Seoul.

Local officials on both islands told AFP that residents had been ordered to evacuate, calling the order a “preventive measure” ahead of South Korea’s military exercise. The order was lifted soon after, Yonhap News Agency reported.

One island resident said they were “trembling in fear” at the barrage.

“At first I thought it was the shells fired by our own military… but later I was told it came from North Korea,” Kim Jin-soo, a resident of Baengnyeong Island, told local broadcaster YTN.

In November, Seoul partially suspended the 2018 military agreement to protest Pyongyang’s deployment of a spy satellite in orbit, prompting the North to scrap it entirely.

“Abrogating the (agreement) increases the possibility of military clashes in the border areas,” Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.

He added that “the evacuation of our residents raises psychological and security concerns that may ultimately destabilize South Korea’s economy.”

CLASH 2010

In 2010, the North bombed Yeonpyeong Island in response to a South Korean fire exercise near the maritime border, killing four South Koreans – two soldiers and two civilians.

This was the first attack on a civilian area since the Korean War of 1950-53.

The South returned fire and the resulting exchange lasted more than an hour as both sides exchanged more than 200 shells, briefly sparking fears of a full-scale war.

Relations between the two Koreas are currently at one of their lowest points in decades after Kim enshrined the country’s status as a nuclear power in the constitution and tested several advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles.

At Pyongyang’s key year-end political meetings, Kim warned of a nuclear attack on the South and called for building up the country’s military arsenal ahead of an armed conflict, which he warned could “break out at any time.”

To deter Pyongyang, Washington stationed a nuclear submarine in the South Korean port city of Busan late last year and flew its long-range bombers in exercises with Seoul and Tokyo.

The North has described Washington’s use of strategic weapons, such as B-52 bombers, in joint exercises on the Korean peninsula as a “deliberate provocation of nuclear war.”

On Friday, KCNA said Kim had called for ramping up production of rocket launchers “in view of the prevailing serious situation that requires the country to strengthen its preparation for a military showdown with the enemy.”

His comments came after the White House accused North Korea of ​​supplying Russia with ballistic missiles and rocket launchers used in recent attacks on Ukraine, in what the U.S. said represented a significant escalation in Pyongyang’s support for Moscow.