North Korea appears to be dismantling power transmission towers that South Korea built to supply electricity to the Kaesong Industrial Region.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Nov. 27 that North Korean soldiers were seen on Nov. 24 climbing transmission towers near the Gyeongui Line and cutting power lines.
“The soldiers severed wires from the first transmission tower located on the North’s side of the border, previously linked to the South, and piled the cut wires at the tower’s base. This seems to be part of efforts to dismantle the structure,” a JCS official said.
The Ministry of Unification also confirmed it was monitoring the situation. “This appears to be part of North Korea’s broader moves to sever ties with the South,” a ministry official said.
Photos released by the ministry show North Korean soldiers atop transmission towers along the Gyeongui Line road, cutting high-voltage wires without safety gear.
The steel-framed towers, constructed in 2007 by Korea Electric Power Corporation, run at several hundred-meter intervals from just north of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) to the Kaesong Industrial Region. The towers provided power to the complex until 2016, when electricity was cut following North Korea’s fourth nuclear test.
Power briefly resumed during a period of warming inter-Korean ties but was halted in June 2020, when North Korea unilaterally demolished the Inter-Korean Liaison Office.
Since December 2023, when North Korea declared the two Koreas would coexist as “separate states,” the North has taken steps to physically sever connections. In January, Kim Jong-un asserted that the two Koreas were no longer a single people but adversarial states at war.
North Korea has since escalated its measures, planting landmines near roads along the Gyeongui and Donghae Lines, removing streetlights and railway sleepers, and, most recently, demolishing road sections along the lines.
