SEOUL, June 12 -- The court that has spent eighteen months dismantling Yoon Suk Yeol's presidency reached the drones on Friday, sentencing the former South Korean leader to 30 years in prison for sending unmanned aircraft into Pyongyang in 2024, and ruling that the incursion was never defense at all but the deliberate manufacture of the crisis his martial law decree would need.

The Seoul Central District Court convicted Yoon over the October 2024 operation that flew drones across the border and, according to North Korea at the time, scattered propaganda leaflets over its capital, Arab News reported. Prosecutors argued, and the court accepted, that Yoon conspired in the incursion from the outset to fabricate wartime conditions, heightenin...