SEOUL: North Korea will launch its “toughest” ever strategy to counter the United States, state media said Sunday, reporting on a key year-end party meeting overseen by leader Kim Jong Un.

The nuclear-armed state held a five-day party meeting last week as part of a drive to chart the country’s course for 2025, the official Korean Central News Agency reported in a lengthy English dispatch. “The US is the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy,” the report said.

It slammed growing ties between South Korea, the US and Japan, saying it had “expanded into a nuclear military bloc for aggression”. It also said South Korea had “turned into an out-and-out anti-communist outpost of the US”. “This reality clearly shows to which direction we should advance and what we should do and how,” KCNA said.

Against this backdrop, Kim’s speech to top officials “clarified the strategy for the toughest anti-US counteraction to be launched aggressively”, the report said without providing details.

The meeting reviewed the response to widespread flooding earlier this year, and also included a vow to boost ties with “friendly” countries. Such party meetings, and Kim’s speeches to officials, are typically used by Pyongyang to make key policy announcements.

The KCNA report comes after Seoul’s military claimed that more than a thousand North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded since they entered combat in Ukraine as part of a military deal between Pyongyang and Moscow. North Korea and Russia have strengthened their military ties since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

A landmark defense pact between Pyongyang and Moscow—signed in June when Russian President Vladimir Putin North Korea—came into force this month.

Putin hailed it as a “breakthrough document”. North Korean state media said Friday that Putin sent a New Year’s message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying, “the bilateral ties between our two countries have been elevated after our talks in June in Pyongyang”.

Ukraine’s allies have called Pyongyang’s growing involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine a “dangerous expansion” of the conflict. — AFP