ATTENTION DIVERSION?

North Korea’s missile launch “appears to have been carried out to deflect attention from international criticism of its troop deployment,” Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.

Seoul has long accused the nuclear-armed North of sending weapons to help Moscow fight Kiev and has claimed Pyongyang has moved to deploy troops en masse following Kim Jong Un’s signing of a mutual defense agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June.

The troop deployment poses a “significant security threat”, Seoul said, and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday called on the North to withdraw its troops.

South Korea’s military warned lawmakers a day earlier that preparations were “almost complete for a long-range ICBM-class missile” and that a launch could be aimed at testing the North’s atmospheric re-entry technology.

Seoul has warned that Russia could provide Pyongyang with new technology or expertise in exchange for weapons and troops to help it fight Ukraine.

It is possible that “Russia actually provided new technologies for re-entry into the atmosphere,” Ahn Chan-il, a defector-turned-researcher who heads the World Institute for North Korea Studies, told AFP.

But it’s more likely that Thursday’s test was an attempt to distract from the troop deployment and get “the world’s attention ahead of the US presidential election,” Ahn added.

Seoul, a major arms exporter, has said it is considering whether to send arms directly to Ukraine in response, something it has previously resisted due to long-standing domestic policy that prevents it from sending weapons to active conflicts.

North Korea has denied sending troops to Russia, but in its first comments in state media last week, its deputy foreign minister said that if such a deployment were to happen, it would be in accordance with international law.

Pyongyang is barred from tests using ballistic technology by several rounds of UN sanctions, but leader Kim has stepped up launches this year, with experts warning he may test weapons before supplying them to Russia.