North Korea fired a barrage of ballistic missiles into the sea Thursday, one day after Kim Jong Un’s sister dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim that the two leaders had recently been in contact.

The South Korean military detected roughly 10 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Pyongyang area, according to CBS News. Launches of that kind are barred by U.N. Security Council resolutions that prohibit North Korea's ballistic missile activity. The launch came after Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s influential sister and closest political confidante, issued a pointed statement in state media late Wednesday. She holds a senior post in the ruling Workers' Party and has long served as the regime's most prominent voice on policy toward Washington and Seoul.

Trump had spent the week highlighting his "very good relationship" with Kim, sharing a photo from their 2019 meeting and telling reporters Wednesday that he expected to meet the North Korean leader again this year. He also ordered the Pentagon to cut back a major annual joint exercise with South Korea, saying the drills sent a "totally inappropriate and hostile" signal to North Korea.

Pyongyang, however, was unmoved.

"As for reports coming out of Washington that there has recently been communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I know absolutely nothing about it, and it would probably be the only matter related to our supreme leadership's foreign policy of which I am unaware," Kim Yo Jong said, according to The Daily Beast.

She said Trump’s concession was "not even worth commenting on" and argued that reducing the exercises did not alter their "provocative and aggressive" nature.

"If the U.S. side calculates that it can portray the measures it has recently taken as some kind of 'goodwill gesture,' it will not get the response it wants," she added.

Her only conciliatory remark was that her brother still holds "fond personal memories and feelings" from his earlier meetings with Trump.

The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, which began this week, will now end Friday, six days ahead of its original schedule, at Trump’s direction. It is not the first such rollback: Trump also suspended several large-scale joint military exercises after his first summit with Kim in Singapore in 2018.

Trump has urged aides to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Kim during his planned November trip to Asia, possibly on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China. A meeting there would be the two leaders' first face-to-face encounter since 2019. He met Kim three times during his first term — in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019 and briefly at the Demilitarized Zone that same year — without securing a denuclearization agreement. The Hanoi talks collapsed over the gap between U.S. demands for disarmament and North Korean demands for sanctions relief. Since then, the North's arsenal has only deepened its footing: it has conducted six nuclear test explosions since 2006, the most recent in 2017, and in 2023 amended its constitution to enshrine its status as a nuclear weapons state.

The push for a diplomatic win has grown as Trump’s war with Iran, which he predicted would last only a few weeks when it began in February, moves toward the six-month mark with no end in sight.