South Korea Sentences Ex-President Yoon to 30 Years Over Drone Plot

A Seoul court sent Yoon Suk Yeol back to a prison cell for most of what is left of his life on Friday, sentencing the disgraced former president to 30 years for ordering military drones into North Korea, flights prosecutors cast as a deliberate attempt to bait Pyongyang into a fight he could then call an emergency.

The Seoul Central District Court found Yoon and his former defense minister, Kim Yong Hyun, guilty of aiding an adversary and abusing their power over the drone operation in October 2024, two months before Yoon plunged the country into crisis with a short-lived declaration of martial law. Both men were given 30-year terms, according to The Manila Times' account of the ruling.

By sending the drones, the court said, the two men sought to provoke North Korea into launching armed attacks or other serious retaliation against the South, manufacturing the national emergency Yoon wanted. The flights exposed the South's military capabilities and pushed the North to strengthen its own defenses.

North Korea said the drones dropped propaganda leaflets over Pyongyang on three occasions that October. Kim, then defense minister, gave a vague denial before the ministry said it could neither confirm nor deny the flights. Tensions spiked. No shots were fired.

A court spokesperson told the AFP news agency that Yoon had been given 30 years in jail, without elaborating. He has denied wrongdoing throughout, and his lawyers said they would appeal.

Yoon's legal team has argued the flights had nothing to do with martial law. They were, the lawyers said, a response to the thousands of trash-filled balloons North Korea had floated across the border earlier in 2024 — and a guilty verdict, they warned, would itself damage South Korea's security interests by second-guessing military decisions. Special prosecutor Cho Eun-suk had sought exactly the term the court handed down: 30 years for Yoon, and 25 for Kim, the confidant who helped mobilize troops on the night everything unraveled.

That night was 3 December 2024. Yoon went on television to accuse opposition lawmakers of being North Korea-sympathizing "anti-state" forces, citing budget fights and a wave of impeachments of his officials, and declared martial law. It held for about six hours, until enough lawmakers pushed past the soldiers and police ringing the National Assembly to vote it down, forcing his cabinet to back off.

The political wreckage was swift. Yoon was impeached, suspended, and formally removed by the Constitutional Court; a snap election handed the presidency to the liberal Lee Jae Myung. He was arrested in July 2025, and the drone case is only one of several criminal trials still moving through the courts.

It is not even the heaviest. The same court had already convicted Yoon of leading an insurrection over the martial law attempt and sentenced him to life in prison, a verdict both Yoon and prosecutors, who wanted the death penalty, have appealed. Friday's 30 years stacks onto a reckoning with little modern precedent in South Korea: a former prosecutor-general turned president, now facing the machinery he once commanded.

Drones remain a raw nerve between the two Koreas, which are still technically at war. President Lee apologized this year after investigators found South Korean officials had again sent drones north in January; Kim Jong Un's powerful sister called the gesture "wise behaviour," before Pyongyang went back to branding the South its "most hostile" enemy. Yoon's defense rested on the claim that he neither ordered nor approved the flights. A panel of judges has now decided otherwise, and the appeal will test whether that finding holds.