A 30-year prison sentence over drone flights into North Korea has deepened the legal reckoning facing former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has now been convicted in a series of trials stemming from his short-lived 2024 martial law declaration.
The Seoul Central District Court on Friday found Yoon and his former defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, guilty of aiding an adversary and abusing their power, sentencing each to 30 years. The court said the two orchestrated drone flights over Pyongyang in October 2024 in an effort to provoke North Korea into a response that could serve as a pretext for emergency measures at home. Special prosecutors had sought 30 years for Yoon and 25 for Kim.
Friday's ruling was the latest in a stack of cases tied to the martial law episode. In January, the same court sentenced Yoon to five years for obstructing his own arrest, falsifying the martial law proclamation, and bypassing a legally required Cabinet meeting — the first verdict in what local prosecutors have pursued as a set of separate criminal trials. In February, a lower court sentenced him to life in prison for leading an insurrection, a ruling lighter than the death penalty prosecutors had sought.
The cases are far from final. Both Yoon and prosecutors have appealed the insurrection verdict, with prosecutors continuing to argue for the maximum penalty. Appeal hearings in the obstruction case opened at the Seoul High Court in March, where prosecutors called the five-year term too lenient and Yoon's lawyers sought an acquittal. Yoon, who is already in custody, can also appeal Friday's drone ruling; his lawyers did not immediately say whether they would.
Prosecutors have framed the drone operation as part of a broader plan to manufacture wartime conditions and justify seizing extraordinary powers. They alleged Yoon sought to brand political opponents — including Lee Jae Myung, then the opposition leader and now president — as "anti-state forces" and to detain them. Yoon has denied wrongdoing. His lawyers said the drone flights were a response to North Korea sending thousands of trash-carrying balloons across the border earlier in 2024, argued the operation was unrelated to martial law, and said a guilty verdict would undermine South Korea's security interests.
Yoon, once the country's top prosecutor before he won the presidency, set off South Korea's gravest political crisis in decades when he imposed martial law on Dec. 3, 2024, and sent troops toward the National Assembly. He was impeached, arrested and removed from office after the Constitutional Court upheld his impeachment, triggering a snap election won by Lee.
Drone flights remain a flashpoint between the two Koreas, which are technically still at war. President Lee expressed regret earlier this year after an investigation found that government officials had sent drones into the North in January.
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