North Korea's Kim Yo Jong says South Korea has 'dual personality' over military drills

Seoul: North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said South Korea and its President Lee Jae Myung had a "dual personality" by talking about wanting to pursue peace while continuing joint military drills with the US, state media KCNA said on Wednesday.

South Korea and its ally the United States kicked off joint military drills this week, including testing an upgraded response to heightened North Korean nuclear threats.

Pyongyang regularly criticises such drills as rehearsals for invasion and sometimes responds with weapons tests, but Seoul and Washington say they are purely defensive.

Since entering office in June, Lee's government has sought to improve relations between the neighbours which are still technically at war following their 1950-1953 conflict, though top North Korean officials have been quoted by state media dismissing overtures made by the South's liberal president. Lee this week ordered his cabinet to prepare a partial step-by-step implementation of existing agreements with North Korea, and South Korea has begun removing loudspeakers that had been blaring anti-North Korea broadcasts along the border.

"Lee Jae Myung is not that man to change this flow of history" of confrontational ambition, Kim said, adding "the (South Korean) government continues to speak rambling pretence about peace and improving relations in order to lay the blame on us for inter-Korean relations never returning again," according to KCNA.

The remarks follow North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's statements, carried by KCNA on Tuesday, which called US-South Korea military exercises an "obvious expression of their will to provoke war" and underscored his country's need to rapidly expand its nuclear armament.