North Korea: Pyongyang furious at “the hostile policy of the United States”

In North Korea, Kim Yo-jong does not mince his words against the United States. The influential sister of leader Kim Jong-un has indeed expressed her dissatisfaction with, according to her, Washington's “unchangeable hostile policy”.

Pyongyang says it “opposes” cyberattacks

“In the current reality, where new records are being set in the implementation of the hostile policy of the United States towards the DPRK [North Korea], it is natural that new records are also being set in our counter-offensive response,” she said, according to remarks reported this Wednesday by the official KCNA news agency.

Kim Jong-un's sister had already criticized the FBI's assertions on Tuesday that North Korea was behind the record $6.3 billion hack on the Binance cryptocurrency platform, assuring that she "resolutely opposes" cyberattacks.

On Wednesday, she therefore attacked Washington again. “We do not view the Binance hacking incident as a sudden fortuitous event or an isolated private scheme, but as an extension of Washington’s unchanging hostile policy toward the DPRK.” “It is clear that the United States’ malicious attempt to gain political and strategic advantage by exploiting this matter has political consequences,” she also said.

A difficult dialogue

The FBI claimed Saturday that a North Korean-affiliated hacker group called TraderTraitor was behind the hack, but in a statement Tuesday, Kim Yo-jong dismissed that account as a "serious political provocation."

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Above all, in his new statement published this Wednesday, Kim Yo-jong suggested that Pyongyang saw little interest in resuming the diplomatic route with the United States. “It is clear to us that we have no reason to sit down with such unreliable and hostile people, who refuse to abandon their policy of confrontation while talking about dialogue,” she said. Relations are therefore strained again between the two countries even though Donald Trump had described his relationship with Kim Jong-un as “very good”.