The development of advanced solid-fuel missiles, which are faster to launch and harder to detect and destroy in advance, has long been a goal for Kim.

North Korea defended the launch to break sanctions, calling it “an appropriate military action that fully serves the purpose of informing rivals… of our willingness to counter,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported, citing Kim.

The test “updated recent records of North Korea’s strategic missile capability,” he said, and Kim vowed that his country “will never change its line of strengthening its nuclear forces.”

Washington criticized the launch as “a flagrant violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement.

Seoul, Washington and Tokyo – key regional security allies – will respond with joint military exercises involving US strategic assets, Seoul said.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol also said the country would “designate new independent sanctions” against the North and work with partners and the UN to penalize Pyongyang’s “habitual violations of Security Council resolutions.”

Divert attention

The North Korean missile launch “appears to have been carried out to divert 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 kyiv and alleged that Pyongyang has moved to deploy soldiers en masse following Kim Jong Un’s signing of a mutual defense agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June.

He troop deployment It represents a “significant security threat,” Seoul said, and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday called on North Korea to withdraw its troops.

The duration and altitude of Thursday’s missile launch indicate that North Korea “tried to assess whether a heavy intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple warheads can actually reach the continental United States,” Yang added.

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

Seoul has warned that Russia could be providing new technology or expertise to Pyongyang in exchange for weapons and troops to help them fight Ukraine.

It is possible that “Russia actually provided new technology to re-enter 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 troop deployment and draw “the world’s attention ahead of the U.S. presidential election,” Ahn added.

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

North Korea has denied sending troops to Russia, but in the first comment on state media last week, its vice foreign minister said that if such a deployment were to occur, it would be in line with international law.

Pyongyang is banned from testing ballistic technology due to multiple rounds of U.N. sanctions, but leader Kim has stepped up launches this year, and experts warn he could be testing weapons before providing them to Russia.