When North Korea fired multiple ballistic missiles from its eastern coast in May, South Korea’s response was swift. Within hours, Seoul joined Washington and Tokyo in condemning the launch as a “serious threat” to regional peace and security.
But just weeks earlier, when a North Korean KN-23 missile – designed to strike South Korean targets – hit a residential building in Kyiv, killing 12 civilians, Seoul said nothing.
That silence fits a broader pattern. There was no response when Russia reportedly deployed a surface-to-air missile system to protect Pyongyang, nor when Ukrainian intelligence revealed that Russian instructors were training North Korean drone pilots on home soil, even as Kim Jong-un voiced “unconditional support” for Moscow’s war.
Relations between the North and South, technically still at war, remain tense and the muted response has raised questions from analysts over whether Seoul fully grasps the consequences of what many see as North Korea’s most significant military transformation in decades – one shaped in real warfare, on the battlefields of Ukraine.
“We definitely should be alarmed,” says Chun In-bum, a former South Korean special forces commander. “But it’s just the nature of people to avoid catastrophe or be indifferent to the terrors of reality.”
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