Activity picked up around a North Korean military training area modeled after South Korea’s presidential Blue House in recent days as Pyongyang prepared for annual spring drills that may simulate infiltration missions into Seoul.

Inter-Korean relations are currently at their lowest point in years, and Pyongyang could use military exercises at the site as a way to bolster its military or even as a show of force towards Seoul if DPRK leader Kim Jong Un publicly guides the drills once again. 

North Korean state media last reported on Kim’s presence at the replica Blue House, also known as “Cheongwadae,” in late 2016, saying that he led special operations “guerrilla warfare” exercises to destroy the building and take out the South’s top leadership. It has remained an active site for exercises in the years since. 

In the latest signs of military drill preparations, two large targets were freshly painted on the mountainsides behind the replica Blue House starting around April 15, according to Planet Labs satellite imagery. Due to the image resolution, it’s unclear if the drills were already carried out as of April 25 or are still planned for the coming days.

If the drills haven’t been held yet and if Kim Jong Un plans to publicly lead new infiltration drills around the mock Blue House this year, then the drills would likely take place as early as the first week of May. That’s because North Korea’s Youth League congress is scheduled to kick off in Pyongyang on Apr. 27, with Kim likely to attend and give opening and closing speeches over the course of several days. 

But instead of publicly carrying out what would be seen by Seoul and Washington as extremely provocative infiltration drills, Kim is more likely to opt for the second-best option of holding the exercises without covering them in state media.

In April 2017 and April 2020, for example, air strike or paratrooper landing targets appeared drawn around and next to the mock Blue House in addition to targets on the mountainsides, indicating troops simulated taking over Seoul in exercises similar to those Kim Jong Un oversaw in Dec. 2016. But other details of those drills were never released in DPRK state media, as it appeared Pyongyang saw it as unnecessary to continue delivering such explicitly provocative messages, or sufficient to allow foreign intelligence and media to notice the drills were taking place via satellite imagery.

As a further sign of the North Korean military’s cautious approach to carrying out these infiltration drills, no new targets were added to the site in April of 2018 and 2019, coming at a time when Pyongyang was still engaged in active negotiations with Washington and Seoul.

It now looks like North Korea’s decision to return to conducting the drills in secret last year and possibly again this year is in line with a policy that started in 2018 of mostly erasing anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean propaganda from public places around the country while maintaining behind-the-scenes ideological education reinforcing Seoul and Washington as the country’s key enemies. 

What’s certain is that the DPRK military planned to use the replica Blue House infiltration training area as the site for fresh springtime exercises this or next month, but it is up to Pyongyang to decide whether to release images and other details that could heighten tensions on the peninsula.