South Korea shortens war games with US citing Washington request

South Korea's annual joint military drills with the US will be cut short by six days at the request of Washington, its defence ministry has announced.

Seoul said that the "period and scale" of the 2026 Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise had been adjusted due to a "proposal of the US side".

The drill will now conclude on 21 August, rather than 27 August as planned. It comes after Donald Trump announced plans to curtail exercises with South Korea, citing his "very good" relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun told a parliamentary hearing that neither South Korean nor US officials had been aware in advance about Trump's plans.

The combined field training exercise component of the drills will also be "partially reduced in scale", Seoul said, noting that the "specific details" of that reduction are still under discussion.

The announcement comes after US officials told the Wall Street Journal that Trump is pushing his aides for a meeting with Kim Jong Un.

Sources told the outlet that the US president had privately discussed setting up an in-person discussion with Kim during his next trip to Asia, which will likely be in November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in China.

Over the weekend, Trump wrote on Truth Social: "These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile."

He added: "While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, 'No thanks!'"

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, the president again explicitly linked his decision to South Korea's refusal to "give us a little hand" with Iran.

"We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next door neighbour, and you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran," he said. "That's strange".

US and South Korean military leaders announced the Ulchi Freedom shield in a joint press conference last week.

At the time, they said the event would be similar in scale to previous years, with about 18,000 South Korean soldiers participating. About 28,500 American military personnel are stationed in South Korea.

During the news conference, military leaders also mentioned North Korea's deployment of troops to aid Russia's war against Ukraine.

US military spokesperson Ryan Donald said "our training accounts for that threat", referring to North Korean soldiers returning from the battlefield.

Following that press conference, North Korea's foreign ministry condemned the joint military drills as "a rehearsal for an aggressive war".

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