---
title: "POWs, a DMZ blast and a sanctions idea: the North Korea quarrels of Chuseok"
description: "Seoul’s holiday debate ran from Kyiv’s revelations to a mine in Paju, then to a standoff between the presidency and the Chief Justice"
author: "Walter Pine"
published: 2026-09-26T04:01:03.764Z
modified: 2026-09-27T02:05:22Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/pows-a-dmz-blast-and-a-sanctions-idea-the-north-korea-quarre-0e5daa
language: en
tags: ["politics", "korea", "trump", "north-korea", "economy", "asia"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# POWs, a DMZ blast and a sanctions idea: the North Korea quarrels of Chuseok

*Seoul’s holiday debate ran from Kyiv’s revelations to a mine in Paju, then to a standoff between the presidency and the Chief Justice*

By Walter Pine · September 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/pows-a-dmz-blast-and-a-sanctions-idea-the-north-korea-quarre-0e5daa

## In brief

- Zelensky said at the UN on Sept 23 that two North Korean soldiers captured in Kursk had been sent to South Korea
- President Lee called the disclosure regrettable, citing a secrecy deal that Ukraine says it never made
- Three soldiers were hurt, two seriously, in a Sept 21 DMZ mine blast; on-site preparatory work began only on the 26th
- Lee told the NYT that trading UN sanctions for a halt to the North’s nuclear and ICBM work had “considerable value”
- Cheong Wa Dae and Chief Justice Jo Hee-dae clashed over a re-nomination request, and the parties traded “insurrection” charges

Chuseok, Korea’s harvest thanksgiving, compresses the country into family rooms fitted out with piles of food and the same rotation of conversation: the children’s schooling, the price of living, which politician has done well and which has not. This year, according to an account by the Chosun Ilbo’s diplomatic-security editor Lee Ha-won, the rotation acquired an uninvited guest. North Korea came up, and it came up three times: the quiet transfer to South Korea of two North Korean soldiers captured in Ukraine, a landmine explosion inside the Demilitarized Zone, and a proposal from President Lee Jae-myung that trade away sanctions on Pyongyang. None of the three had much to do with the others. All of them landed on the same holiday table.

## The prisoners nobody was meant to hear about

On September 23, in the middle of the long break, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky paused in his address to the United Nations General Assembly to share a fact: two North Korean soldiers, captured by Ukrainian forces while fighting for Russia in the Kursk region, had recently been sent to the Republic of Korea. The pair had asked for it, through an exclusive interview with the Chosun Ilbo and a handwritten letter. Their arrival, according to Ukraine’s president, was already complete.

President Lee, travelling in Mexico, did not answer with gratitude. On social media he expressed regret. Seoul and Kyiv, he wrote, had agreed not to publicise the transfer. “I do not know what circumstances Ukraine may have, but it is very regrettable,” he said, adding that the repatriation of North Korean prisoners is “an extremely sensitive agenda item with large effects on diplomacy, security and the situation on the Korean Peninsula.” The Ukrainian government answered through local media: it had made no such promise of non-disclosure. An act of humanitarian cooperation had thus become, in the Chosun Ilbo’s telling, a piece of bilateral friction.

The paper allowed that Seoul’s wish for silence was understandable enough — the safety of the prisoners’ families still in the North, the tremors for inter-Korean and South Korea–Russia relations — but noted that both men were already publicly known and had themselves declared where they wanted to go. The dispute was also an uncomfortable echo. As a presidential candidate in February 2022, Lee had called Zelensky a “six-month novice politician” who provoked Russia by loudly declaring for NATO membership; he later apologised. On the 26th, Park Jie-won, a Democratic Party lawmaker and former director of the National Intelligence Service, took the rare step of criticising his own government: “Why hide at the back instead of acting assertively? If our diplomacy only chases after Ukraine’s late drum, what becomes of the people’s self-respect?”

## Five quiet days beside the wire

Two days before Zelensky spoke, on September 21, soldiers of the Army’s 25th Division were working inside the western DMZ at Paju, Gyeonggi Province, when a blast, believed to be a landmine, went off. Three noncommissioned officers were hurt, two of them seriously. Eighteen men had been committed to the task, with mine detectors in operation, cutting a new search route near the military demarcation line so that the United Nations Command could conduct a field investigation. There were two explosions, not one.

The reason the accident held the country’s attention lies a short walk to the north. Since Kim Jong-un declared, in 2023, that inter-Korean relations were those of “two hostile states,” his army has been laying mines, erecting barrier walls and cutting tactical roads along the MDL — a fortification campaign that has repeatedly sent North Korean soldiers across the line. In August, on the eastern front, South Korean troops answered an incursion with a warning broadcast and warning shots. On September 10, People Power Party lawmaker Yoo Yong-won told the National Assembly that North Korean minefields in parts of the western front protruded some 10 to 15 metres past the MDL.

The military’s position is one of care: the blast site lies apart from areas where the North’s mining is suspected, and possibilities including old mines displaced from their original beds must all be examined. The Chosun Ilbo did not dispute the need for precision. It disputed the speed. Only on September 26 — five days on — did the military and the UNC set out to secure an access route and survey the operating environment, preparatory work, not the crash-scene investigation itself. In between, it rained in Paju, and concerns rose that fragments and disturbed soil had been washed or lost. Han Dong-hoon staged a one-man protest in front of the Defense Ministry. “The Lee administration still trembles, doing nothing but mind North Korea’s temper,” said lawmaker Na Kyung-won; “every kind of suspicion is amplified.” Kim Eun-hye: “The people could not spend the Chuseok holiday at ease. A military response so slow and so hard to understand only inflates the suspicion that the public is being kept from something bigger.” Even Park Jie-won joined them: “If our soldier was hurt in a mine accident, the facts must be disclosed as they are — then the people will understand.”

## Sanctions of ‘little real effect’

The third argument began in New York, in an interview with the New York Times. “Trading sanctions that have no particular real effect for a halt to the development of additional nuclear weapons and ICBM technology has, I think, considerable value,” President Lee said. “If denuclearization is made the goal under current circumstances, nothing will be achieved.” The administration had floated partial easing before; it had never before called openly for the dismantling of the UN Security Council’s sanctions regime. On September 22, in his General Assembly keynote, Lee laid out a three-stage path — halt, then reduction, then “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula,” a phrase that quietly replaces “denuclearization of North Korea.” In a January New Year’s press conference he had already mentioned arms-control talks premised on the North as a nuclear state.

The objections came quickly. “That North Korea would be tolerated in keeping its nuclear weapons while the risk of a nuclear attack on the South remains is a serious problem,” said Ewha Womans University professor Park Won-gon. Park Sung-hoon, chief spokesperson of the People Power Party, offered a shorter syllogism: “If sanctions have no effect, why would North Korea be so desperate to have them lifted?” The Chosun Ilbo added a reminder from the archive: freeze-for-compensation deals have been tried before, more than once, and Pyongyang, the paper argued, took the benefit and resumed the work.

What unites all three, the paper concluded, is the direction of travel. Each dispute, in its way, seemed to favour or to accommodate the North — the thanks that did not get said, the scene that sat unwalked, the sanctions declared empty — and by the end of the holiday the question moving from table to table was a blunt one: is President Lee watching Kim Jong-un’s mood?

## A second quarrel, entirely domestic

The holiday season also produced a fight with the judiciary. On September 22, the presidential office asked Chief Justice Jo Hee-dae to nominate anew candidates for the Supreme Court; on the 23rd, just before the break, Jo answered that the claim of procedural flaws in the nomination process was “hard to accept.” Cheong Wa Dae countered that the Court Administration Office’s sounding-out of existing candidates about re-running the recommendation procedure was “a grave procedural flaw,” and counselled the Chief Justice to read the official correspondence “from the perspective of an ordinary citizen possessed of sound common sense.”

On September 26 the parties went at it in the open. Park Sung-jun, chief spokesperson of the Democratic Party, said the Chief Justice was retracing, one step at a time, “the road to ruin that Yoon Suk-yeol walked,” and asked: “What is moving the Supreme Court now — the constitution and conscience, or insurrectionist forces and a slice of the political world?” “Cho Hee-dae will be left in history as the man who wrecked the judiciary,” he added. The opposition’s Park Sung-hoon answered in kind: “Is refusing the president’s will an insurrection?” He accused the ruling party of branding the head of a constitutional institution a rebel, pressing him with a national investigation and a special prosecutor, and preparing “a mean-spirited reprisal” in the form of cuts to the court’s budget. “This, if anything, is insurrection,” he said. President Lee and his party, he demanded, should stop intimidating the judiciary at once.

As the holiday closed, neither quarrel had. The soldiers’ blast site still awaited its full investigation; the Chief Justice had not moved; the sanctions idea was still being argued over. At the Chuseok tables, the conversation will have been longer than usual.

## Sources

- [추석 민심 달군 3대 북한 이슈…“李, 김정은 눈치 보나”](https://chosun.com/politics/diplomacy-defense/2026/09/27/AJD64DNUPFHX5L4RAAKVUKPHBI/) — chosun.com
- [조희대 대법원장 '재제청 거부'에 여야 정면 충돌](https://chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2026/09/26/FYQZC2P2Z5BVXO7VPIGHKN7EU4/) — chosun.com