South Korean President Moon Jae-in pledged Monday to pursue an “irreversible path to peace” with North Korea until the end of his five-year term in May, despite the North Korean leader’s unresponsiveness to the country’s proposal for an end-of-war declaration.
Kim aims to bolster North Korea’s military capabilities and develop “high-tech weapon systems” in response to the instability on the Korean Peninsula.
While Moon acknowledged that “there is still a long way to go” for the two countries to “institutionalize sustainable peace” on the Korean Peninsula, he believes that the “international community will respond” if both sides resume dialogue and cooperation.
The person was first spotted in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—a zone separating the two Koreas—at around 9:20 p.m., and a search operation was carried out to capture the person but failed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The military discovered from monitoring equipment that the person had climbed the barbed wire fence and entered the DMZ at around 6:40 p.m., indicating that the breach went unnoticed until 9:20 p.m.
The person was later identified as a North Korean defector, who appeared to be in his 30s. The military surveillance footage showed that the man appears to be the same defector who entered South Korea via an eastern front-line route in November 2020.
South Korea said it had notified North Korea about the border crossing but had yet to receive any reply.