South Korea’s military leadership called the actions “very inappropriate” and urged North Korea to stop its military actions “immediately”.

Earlier this month, the nuclear-armed North carried out similar launches on two occasions, March 2 and 9. Pyongyang said they had conducted “long-range artillery” drills, but Japan said the projectiles appeared to be ballistic missiles.

The latest launch comes amid a prolonged hiatus in disarmament talks with the United States.

Soon before the launch, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the country would convene its rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), on April 10 – despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Saturday’s launch came weeks after Kim sent a personal letter to the South’s President Moon, offering “comfort” for the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

At the time, the South was the country hardest-hit by the virus outside China, but Seoul appears to have largely brought the outbreak under control – while Pyongyang insists it has not had a single case.

North Korea’s Kim shuns virus protection to watch artillery drills

Pyongyang is under multiple sets of sanctions by the United Nations and the United States over its weapons programmes.

The North carried out a series of weapons trials late last year, the last of them in November, which it often described as multiple launch rocket systems, although others called them ballistic missiles.

Heightened tensions in 2017 were followed by two years of nuclear diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington, including three meetings between Kim and Trump, but little tangible progress was made.

Global concerns over North Korea intensified late in 2019 after Pyongyang imposed a year-end deadline for the United States to offer sanctions relief and threatened to send a “Christmas gift”, widely interpreted to mean a weapons test, if their demands were not met.

Kim said the world would see a “new strategic weapon” from the country in the near future, in a message on January 1.

The Trump administration is demanding that North Korea give up all its nuclear weapons and production facilities in exchange for the lifting of crippling sanctions.

Trump famously said in 2018 that he and Kim “fell in love” and that the North Korean letter wrote him “beautiful letters”.

But after two high-profile one-on-one summits and a meeting last year on the demilitarised zone, relations have soured with the nuclear talks near-frozen and Pyongyang once again referring to Trump as a “dotard,” among other insults.

Additional reporting by DPA