Pyongyang on Tuesday denounced UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calling his recent statement "unfair" over its missile launches, which it described as "just counteraction for self-defense to cope with the U.S. military provocations," its state media reported.

Guterres earlier on Friday condemned the recent missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and urged the DPRK to "immediately desist from taking any further provocative action."

"I think that the unfair and prejudiced behavior of the UN secretary general is to blame to some extent for the situation on the Korean peninsula getting so serious," Kim Son Gyong, DPRK's vice foreign minister for international organizations said in statement carried by state media KCNA.

Also on Tuesday, Pyongyang denied that it has ever had arms dealings with Russia and said it has "no plans to do so in the future," its state media reported, after the United States said the country appears to be supplying Russia with a "significant" number of artillery shells for Ukraine.

"We regard such moves of the U.S. as part of its hostile attempt to tarnish the image of the DPRK in the international arena by invoking the illegal 'sanctions resolution' of the (UN Security Council) against the DPRK," the official said in a statement carried by KCNA.

According to a KCNA report published Monday, the country fired more than 80 missiles between November 2 and 5, and conducted air force drills involving "500 fighters … to show the will to counter the combined air drill of the enemy," a direct response to the Vigilant Storm" drill between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea (ROK) which extended by one day in response to Pyongyang's volley of missile tests.

Officials from the ROK and the U.S. believe Pyongyang has made technical preparations to test a nuclear device, the first time it will have done so since 2017. ROK's Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Monday that a ROK ship had recovered debris believed to be part of that short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) fired by Pyongyang, the first time a DPRK ballistic missile had landed near ROK waters.

The photos released by state media, according to analysts, have appeared to show a previously unreported new type or variant of ICBM. The KCNA statements did not elaborate.

(With input from Reuters)

(Cover: Recent missile tests conducted by the DPRK are pictured in this undated combination photo taken at undisclosed locations and released on November 7, 2022, by Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). /Reuters)