Chung Jom-sig, floor leader of the opposition People Power Party, called for the dismissal of Unification Minister Chung Dong-young and National Intelligence Service Director Lee Jong-seok, criticizing the Lee Jae-myung administration's decision to withdraw additional staff from South Korea's mission in Ukraine. "An emotional response will only deepen public anxiety," he said.
Chung made the remarks in a Facebook post on the 21st titled "Is the Lee Jae-myung administration's diplomatic line an alignment with North Korea, China and Russia?" He wrote that "our people feel anxious because of North Korea's provocations, cracks in the South Korea-U.S. alliance, and the Lee Jae-myung administration's half-baked push to take back wartime operational control."
"Diplomacy must be colder-headed than any other area of state affairs," he said, criticizing the government by adding that he "cannot understand why the government is going this far emotionally."
Chung pointed to the sequence of events following the dispute between the South Korean and Ukrainian governments over the repatriation of North Korean prisoners of war — President Lee Jae-myung's social media remarks, the recall of the ambassador to Ukraine and the additional withdrawal of mission staff. "What does the government hope to gain from an extreme conflict with Ukraine?" he asked.
"The government says the staff withdrawal is because of the threat of air strikes, but no one will take that at face value," he said. "The war in Ukraine has gone on for more than four years. Why take such a step only after a dispute arose over the repatriation of North Korean prisoners of war?"
He also leveled criticism at the president's North Korea policy. "President Lee defined it as an 'unforeseen accident' even though North Korea carried out a land mine provocation," Chung wrote. "And even though North Korea spelled out a pre-emptive nuclear strike in its nuclear forces policy law, he called the North's nuclear weapons a 'last-resort defensive weapon.'"
"The Lee Jae-myung administration is extremely servile toward our main adversary while extremely high-handed toward Ukraine, a member of the Western world," he said. "It is obvious that the conflict with Ukraine will spill over into relations with the European Union. Unless the government's diplomatic line is a break from the Western world and an alignment with the North Korea-China-Russia bloc, this kind of behavior cannot be explained."
"If the Lee Jae-myung administration's diplomatic line is not an alignment with North Korea, China and Russia, it must prove so through personnel decisions," Chung said. "It must start by firing Minister Chung Dong-young and Director Lee Jong-seok, who follow North Korea. This is the minimum step for foreign policy and security."
Yoon Sang-hyun, a five-term lawmaker, also said that "a hard-line response that jeopardizes even a strategic cooperative relationship is by no means a decision that serves the national interest." He added that the government "must explain the objective grounds for withdrawing as much as half of the mission's personnel at precisely the moment when the diplomatic conflict has intensified."
"Above all, Ukraine is an important security partner that has faced North Korean troops in actual combat and has obtained intelligence on their tactics and drone warfare operations," Yoon said. "At a time when North Korean forces are accumulating experience in modern warfare, what kind of security strategy is it to escalate conflict with the very country fighting them?"
"Worrying signals are also coming one after another in the South Korea-U.S. relationship," he said. "At a time when we should be checking the trust of our alliance, the government is even escalating a diplomatic conflict with Ukraine."
He added that "if we lose a greater national interest while trying to extract an apology from another country, that is not a diplomatic achievement but diplomatic self-harm." Yoon said the Lee Jae-myung administration "must withdraw its emotional response and return to diplomacy that puts the Republic of Korea's security and national interest at the center."