North Korea News Podcast by NK News - DMZ construction, plans to flood the border and North Korea’s air force showcase

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

This week, NK News senior analytic correspondent Colin Zwirko joins the podcast to discuss recent developments along the inter-Korean border, as well North Korea’s latest event showcasing new air force weaponry. He begins by sharing what satellite imagery shows about the DPRK’s construction projects within the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone, some of which appear to […]

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and I'm joined in the studio by Colin Zwerko. Colin, welcome back on the show. Hello, Jacko. And we've got a couple of stories to talk about today that you've been working on lately, and two of them are DMZ related, and one of them is Air Force related. Yep. So let's start with the... the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, as I like to call it,

the North Koreans have been busy, I guess, re-fortifying the border. Now that they've worked out that South Korea is a separate country and they've given up on the dream of unification, they are showing it by adding new fortifications and knocking down trees and building fences and, well, give us the overall spiel. Yeah, so starting in early 2024, the fight. Which is shortly after that speech that Kim Jong-un gave in which he said,

no more peaceful unification. Exactly, yeah. So they're starting from then kind of put things into action physically on the ground. So from last summer until this summer, from 2024 to 2025, we started to see new lines

cutting across the forest all throughout the DMZ. How do you see this? Because we can't go up there. Yeah, yeah. It's through satellite imagery, through Planet Lab satellite imagery primarily, where we can get the latest imagery just taken in those.

the last few hours every day. Oh, great. And yeah, so we, at first, it was kind of curious, what are they doing here? Then more photos started to come out, like the South Korean military would release some photos. You see thousands of North Korean soldiers, young conscripted soldiers, building these paths, sometimes fences. We can't say that it's like a border wall or a border fence in all instances until we have a really clear image in every location because it's kind different. But yeah, so the DMZ is split. There's like three lines. The MDL, the military demarcation line, is I think of that right? Yep. In the middle. And then on either side of that is the northern boundary line and the southern boundary line. And so that forms the DMZ

between the northern and the southern boundary line bifurcated. So technically, if I understand and remember correctly from the armistice disagreement, each side is able to go up to the military demarcation line, but not beyond it. Right, exactly. And it even says you can't have an active military presence in the DMZ, but both sides threw that out the window pretty early on. Right, they have forward observation posts and guard posts, right, GPs and OPs. Now, there have been occasionally some incidents there where warning shots have been fired by the South Koreans when they said, oh, the North Koreans who were there working on fences got too close or came across the MDL. Yeah, so the MDL is not a fence. It's not aligned.

drawn on the ground, it's just marked by a few hundred. I don't remember the exact. There is an exact number of posts that are, that if you connect the dots, so to speak, that's the MDL. Right, they're about 100 yards apart or something and they stretch all the way across the peninsula saying this is where the military demarcation line is. But those posts, they've been there for 78, what, so many years. Yeah, they haven't been maintained. There's no been maintenance since like the 70s. So a lot of them are thought to be either covered up with vegetation or, you know. Frust that will fall off or something, yeah. Gone away.

So that can be blamed on some of the crossings. You can call them accidental by the North. But the fact is that there's thousands of North Korean soldiers in the DMZ, very active right now, building. So what we're seeing are new forward defense lines, if we can call them that, which is they used to have their own lines drawn within the DMZ where they would patrol those lines in, between guard posts and whatnot, and those lines would have fencing, and that's what they considered their secure border, even though their own territory goes up to the MDL. And they're kind of extending this now. So these lines now go closer to the MDL.

They even crossed the MDL in one location that we noticed last year. That's naughty. Very much. South Korea at the time, strangely, it was under Yun looking for excuses to start a war with North Korea, as we found out later with his drone incursions. strangely the union administration did not care and they gave excuses saying I can't remember actually if it was the UNC or the South Korean maybe the JCS side someone said that the MDL is classified and I thought that was very strange and that's false

that is weird but the fact is that they did cross the MDL you confirmed it by comparing the armistice maps they only did that once so what we've seen in last five months is they've built a lot more of these lines across the DMZ. They're about, you know, if we could calculate it roughly, 74% done, 75% done. Okay, so that's three quarters. And your maps that, I mean, you've got, there are a lot of pictures in this NK Pro investigation that you've written. Yeah, if you want to know what I'm talking about,

definitely go look at the images. Right, and you can see there you've marked in orange the, sorry, well, depending on when they were built, you've marked some sections in blue and some in orange, so it really shows very detailed. Yeah, they did a certain amount through the first year, and then they've done more than that just in the last five months. So the point is that they've accelerated this project,

might have something to do with the upcoming Congress, Kim Jong-un wanting to get this done, wanting to present the new maps. There are some interesting questions, I think. I think there's not much incentive for North Korea to change their understanding of the country's territorial borders at the south. It's a different question when you talk about the, maritime border, but the land border, even though they're creating these new defense lines,

it's not like they're going to cede the territory beyond that between those defense lines and the MDL to South Korea or anything. So I think this is just all about security. And, you know, keeping, it's symbolic showing we're a separate country. It's to keep North Koreans from escaping. And it's, you know, also for defending against South Korea because they learned a lot of lessons about what potentially hostile South Korean administration, like the UNAM. administration what they could do. So there are a lot of reasons for this.

Now, as well as fences, there's also walls and tank traps too, right? Yeah, again, it's, I don't want to generalize what is being constructed. There's a lot of different kinds of construction across in the more remote areas. You can't see anything on a low resolution of misery. We need high resolution of misery for the whole border, and that is not something we're counting on having anytime soon because it's very expensive. But in certain locations, you can see it looks like a wall. It doesn't continue the whole way, though. Maybe you could call it a tank trap. South Korean government has described it as all those things.

Okay. Do we know anything about mining in these areas, too? Yeah, the soldiers are apparently conducting demining, but they're also dying. South Korean soldiers have died. The JCS has reported, the South Korean military authorities have reported many instances of explosions on the North Korean side, so you've got thousands of people pouring into a heavily mined area. What do you expect? Right.

So there's some sad accidental deaths going on there. Now, in as much as there's some area, what, about 24, 26%, I think you said, that hasn't been re-fortified, refenced yet. We've got something interesting happen in one area over there near Kumgang San on the east coast. That was the area, of course, that for about a decade from 1998 until 2008 was an inter-Korean tourist zone. and tourists from Korea would go up there by bus. Take the bus here in Guangdong when I did that once very early in the morning and they'd drive you across to the east coast

and then up the border and into Kunggang. That area now, something's going on there. Yeah, this is quite interesting, something to watch, something that hasn't happened yet, but which North Korea very slyly showed us in a video of Kim Jong-un last week. So Kim went to a opening ceremony for a power station, in Kangwan province, North Korea, same name as Kangwan province on the east coast in South Korea.

And they've also got the same Koso County, Koso County on both sides, yeah. Yeah, so the border splits Koso County of Kongwan Province. Right. And this map that Kim Jong-un is shown looking at, which talks about all of the different power stations in Kangwan province, there's a marking on the map that shows a power station to be constructed in the future. And it... Hydro power, so that's renewable.

energy. Okay, separate subject. But it illustrates on the map a large blue area right on the MDL, the border. Wow. And so very carefully overlaid the maps, compared the maps, made sure that the location that I was looking at was correct. And the conclusion is that North Korea is going to flood the DMZ on their side with the waters of a reservoir made by a dam and a power station. upriver heading south, that area would be flooded by this dam, creating a reservoir where the water shore of this reservoir would go right up against the MDL and potentially cross it into South Korean territory. You mean the water? The water, depending on how this is built and it's not been built yet.

So this is something hidden in a North Korean TV broadcast, no details beyond that, but what they've illustrated and what they're suggesting is very clear. Very interesting. Okay, so this is the Pongpore Dam that we're talking about? No, that was the dam that they built, that Kim, that was the reason for this appearance. Okay, so he's got one dam that's been built, and then this is a proposed dam, as yet unnamed. Kosoong Yiho, Gungmin Power Johnson, so it's the Kossong number two army people power station. Power station, okay, and that may include some flooding of the northern part of the demilitar zone, maybe even across the military demarcation line

into the southern part of the demilitarized zone. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, one thing is clear that if they do go forward with this project, which they don't always do, with things that they show in little maps that Kim Jong-Lan's looking at, but if they do, flooding the DMZ is its own interesting thing

that they could do. And that would definitely happen. There's no question about that if they actually do go forward with this. The only question is what South Korea thinks of that. Well, and what does the, United Nations Command think about that, is that an armistice violation? Yeah, well. We wait to see whether it happens, right? I imagine that since it's not yet happened, they're probably not in the mood to

speculate on these things. Right, but so, you know, I've gotten some contact from people, I guess the South Korean government is paying attention to this. They're curious about whether this will go forward and I'll just watch it in satellite imagery and see, you know, when this begins, if it does. Very interesting. Okay, that is, so that's two stories on the DMZ. Now, let's talk about North Korea's Air Force, Kim Jong-un, brought his daughter to work again, which he hasn't done since that trip to Beijing in September. Yes, the daughter is still alive. Everyone reset your daughter disappearance website counter.

Yeah, anyway, he went to this 80th anniversary celebration for the Air Force at Wanan Kalama Airport. Okay, that's that airport right by the new tourist resort, yes? Yeah, on the East Coast. And so they put a bunch of weapons under a hangar. Kim Jong-un walked through the hangar, looked at the weapons for a minute. Then they did a bunch of other stuff, you know, like watching some flyovers. Okay, so that's a typical daddy-daughter-to-work day where they look at military things. Sure. Right? That normally when she comes out, it's a missile, and today it's, or recently, on, what was the day there? The Aviation Day last Friday. How did you celebrate it? Well, it used to be Rocket Forces Day, but they don't do that anymore. The November 20th. 29th holiday. But, I don't know, strangely, they did this whole event on Friday, and then they

didn't report it in state media until Sunday. I don't know. I found that kind of interesting, but there are a few interesting points about this event. They showed us a new combat drone. This is kind of like a, so we will have an article by a contributor named Yost. You've probably heard of him. Yose Holymonds. He's going to write something, and I saw it. It talks about how this combat drone is somewhat similar to a Mojave named model. I'm sorry if I'm getting that incorrect, but I just briefly looked at this earlier. Basically, they're copying designs again from around the world, not precise copies, but they're copying.

This is a new attack drone. They also showed a new Taurus-like missile that would be launched from a jet. They showed off two surface-to-air missile systems. This comes a couple of years after they did. after Kim Ya-jong threatened to shoot down U.S. and South Korean reconnaissance flights along the east and west coasts, well, you know, far away from the coast. Yeah. And, you know, they're putting a lot of stuff together here, basically.

So they're showing a lot of stuff. They're making a lot of suggestions. Experts kind of doubt that, you know, all this is quite up to the level that they're suggesting by showing it off. You know, there's still a lot of development to be done. But Kim's trying to give the Air Force its attention, trying to give it its nuclear weapons role. similar to how a couple years ago he went to the Navy and was like, you know, we're going to revive the Navy. And if you think about it, back then there was the narrative for years and years was neglected Navy, neglected Navy.

Right. Nothing's going on with the Navy. And the same narrative is going on with the Air Force. And then we saw the amount of resources he poured into the Navy, building these new destroyers. Of course, there's still questions. But I think it's a good sign of what's to come with the Air Force. I don't think we should doubt that maybe they'll acquire some better jets. Maybe these drones, even though there's some fakery with these drones,

they've only showed us one of these combat drones actually flying. It's going somewhere, I think. The question that always flamuxes me, though, is how does North Korea get all of its jet fuel? I mean, that must be hard under sanctions, right? I think these days, with the amount of, you know, they've got all this oil smuggling with Russia going on, I don't know all the details, but there are some reporting I've seen out there on that. I think that there's no shortage of channels for North Korea to acquire this. And their partners, Russia and China do not recognize sanctions in too much degree anymore.

Yeah, and it's interesting that in the story that you've written there, Kim Jong-un has hailed the Air Force as one that has stood at the forefront of the struggle to protect the sovereignty and national interests of the DPRK. It's also called the firstborn service of the Korean People's Army, which is a surprising one. I'm not sure why that would be the first born service since the Korean People's Army started off on land before they had airplanes. And in fact, the first planes that fought for the North Koreans in the Korean War were Soviets. Interesting little. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Shreyas wrote that article, but I'm sorry. I helped out a little bit.

But I think it's funny. Every time he goes to a different branch of the military, he says things sort of hyperbolicly. like you are the most important branch of the military. I think it's all maybe just hyperbolic. And it's nice to see that as the weather gets colder that Kim Jong-in has broken out his full-length matrix leather black coat again for those public appearances. Yes, and the daughter as well.

Right. Well, that's it. You know, it's got to stay warm in the winter. Thank you very much, Colin, for joining me on the show, and we'll see you again very soon. Thanks, Shagel. Bestsellers unveiled at NK News Shop. Step out in style with our top-selling apparel from the NK News Shop,

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Again, that's shop.nknews.org. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode, and to our post-recording producer genius Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.