Korean war anniversary shows radical shift after flurry of diplomacy
Unlike previous years, North Korea’s colourful anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be seen, two weeks after the Trump-Kim summit
Seoul — The two Koreas on Monday marked their war anniversary in a mood of detente, with Pyongyang dropping its customary anti-US rhetoric and Seoul saying talks have begun on moving the North’s artillery back from the tense border. Pyongyang’s tightly controlled official media are normally packed with anti-American invective on June 25, the day in 1950 the North launched a mass invasion of the South. But this year proved to be a marked exception in the wake of the historic Singapore summit. In the South, Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said discussions were taking place about relocating Pyongyang’s long-range artillery away from their border. North Korea is estimated to have around 1,000 artillery pieces along the frontier, threatening much of the South’s capital Seoul only 50km away. The North has long accused the US of provoking the 1950-53 Korean War as part of a plan for global domination and blames it for the division of the peninsula, agreed between Moscow and Washington in the cl...
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