North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shared center stage with senior delegates from Russia and China as he rolled out his most powerful, nuclear-capable missiles in a military parade in the capital, Pyongyang, marking a major war anniversary with a show of defiance against the United States.
State media said Friday Kim attended Thursday evening’s parade with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chinese ruling party official Li Hongzhong from a balcony looking over the city’s main square.
The streets and stands were packed with tens of thousands of mobilized spectators, who roared in approval as waves of goose-stepping soldiers, tanks and huge, intercontinental ballistic missiles wheeled out on launcher trucks filled up the main road. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said the parade also featured ceremonial flights of newly developed surveillance and attack drones, which were first unveiled by state media this week as they reported on an arms exhibition attended by Kim and Shoigu.
KCNA did not say whether Kim made a speech during the parade. It did summarize a speech by North Korean Defense Minister Kang Sun Nam, who described the parade as a historic celebration of the country’s “great victory against the American imperialists and the forces of their follower nations” and said the North under Kim’s leadership would “prosper indefinitely.”Black-and-white synthetic aperture radar imagery from satellites showed what appeared to be a massing of people at Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square, named after Kim’s state-founding grandfather.
