text: Seoul (CNN) North and South Korean athletes will march together at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony under a unified flag, the South said Wednesday, in a diplomatic breakthrough following days of talks between the two countries. 
   
   The nations have also agreed to form a joint North and South Korean women's ice hockey team for the Games in Pyeongchang, which begin early next month, South Korea's unification ministry said. 
   
   The unification ministry announced a range of joint activities between the countries for the Games, following talks Wednesday at the demilitarized zone (DMZ). 
   
   North and South Korean skiers will train together at a resort in North Korea before the Olympics start, and performers from the two countries will also hold a joint cultural event at Mount Kumgang. 
   
   North Korea will also send around 230 supporters to cheer on its athletes. A smaller delegation of North Korean athletes and supporters will attend the Paralympics, the ministry said. 
   
   The Korean Unification Flag features a blue silhouette of the peninsula and outlying islands. The two countries have marched under the flag before, in rare shows of unity, first at the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships, and at a number of sporting events since. It was most recently used at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy 
   
   The International Olympics Committee (IOC) would need to approve the countries' agreements, and those that affect competition, such as the joint hockey team, could be more complicated than the ceremonial proposals. 
   
   The committee said Wednesday it had received a number of "interesting proposals" that it would discuss with delegates from both countries in Switzerland on Saturday. 
   
   "We are sure that the two Korean delegations will present their ideas and proposals at the meeting on Saturday in Lausanne. This will then enable the IOC to carefully evaluate the consequences and the potential impact on the Olympic Games and the Olympic competitions," it said in a statement. 
   
   Diplomatic thaw 
   
   Wednesday's announcement is the latest breakthrough since talks began between the two Koreas earlier this month, after years of broken communications. 
   
   While the two sides have earned praise for ratcheting down military tensions in recent weeks, some of Seoul's allies voiced concern Wednesday that Pyongyang may be using the talks to buy time to pursue its weapons program. 
   
   The US military has moved more firepower to the region and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned of complacency at a Tuesday summit in Vancouver where the top diplomats from the United States, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom were in town to discuss North Korea. 
   
   Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono called on the international community to be clear-eyed about North Korea's motivations for participating in the talks, which have been hailed by some as the most significant thaw in ties in years. 
   
   "I believe that North Korea wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear and missile programs," Kono said at the meeting. "It's not the time to ease pressure towards North Korea." 
   
   China denounced the Vancouver talks, and the United Nations Command, under whose framework they are being held, as demonstrating "Cold War mentality." 
   
   "(Such thinking) will only lead to split in the international community and harm the joint efforts that could properly solve the nuclear issue on Korea peninsula," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Wednesday. 
   
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   Limited progress 
   
   It remains to be seen how much progress achieved before the Olympics will be retained after the games are over, or if tensions will again worsen. 
   
   John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned against viewing the talks as a major breakthrough. 
   
   "Both Koreas are primarily utilizing the talks for a limited objective -- arranging the participation of a North Korean delegation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics," Park said. 
   
   South Korea's Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said the talks were a "significant step" but acknowledged the serious challenges ahead: "Despite these overtures to improve relations with the South, North Korea has yet to show any intention to fulfill its international obligations regarding denuclearization." 
   
   North Korea has remained adamant throughout this month's thaw in relations with South Korea that its nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles are here to stay. 
   
   Joint US-South Korea military drills -- which always infuriate Pyongyang and raise tensions on the peninsula -- have been suspended for the duration of the upcoming Olympics as a show of good faith, but they are likely resume following the competition. ||||| SEOUL (Reuters) - The two Koreas will field a combined women’s ice hockey team and march together under one flag at next month’s Winter Olympics in the South, Seoul said on Wednesday, after a new round of talks amid a thaw in cross-border ties. 
   
   North and South Korea have been talking since last week - for the first time in more than two years - about the Olympics, offering a respite from a months-long standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, although Japan urged caution over the North’s “charm offensive”. 
   
   The two Koreas will compete as a unified team in the Olympics for the first time, though they have joined forces at other international sports events before. 
   
   North Korea will send a delegation of more than 400, including 230 cheerleaders, 140 artists and 30 Taekwondo players for a demonstration, a joint press statement released by Seoul’s Unification Ministry said, adding the precise number of athletes will be hammered out after discussions with the IOC scheduled for later this week. 
   
   Prior to the Games, the sides will carry out joint training for skiers at the North’s Masik Pass resort and a cultural event at the Mount Kumgang resort, for which Seoul officials plan to visit the sites next week. 
   
   “Under the circumstances where inter-Korean (relations) are extremely strained, in fact just some 20 days ago we weren’t expecting North Korea would participate in the Olympics”, said Chun Hae-sung, the South’s chief negotiator and vice unification minister. 
   
   “It would have a significant meaning if the South and North show reconciliation and unity, for example through a joint march”. 
   
   The North Korean delegation will begin arriving in South Korea on Jan. 25, according to the joint statement. 
   
   The North will separately send a 150-strong delegation to the Paralympics, Chun said. 
   
   ‘IT’S NOT THE TIME’ 
   
   Twenty nations meeting in the Canadian city of Vancouver agreed on Tuesday to consider tougher sanctions to press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned the North it could trigger a military response if it did not choose dialogue. 
   
   Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said the world should not be naive about North Korea’s “charm offensive” over the Olympics. 
   
   “It is not the time to ease pressure, or to reward North Korea”, Kono said. “The fact that North Korea is engaging in dialogue could be interpreted as proof that the sanctions are working.” 
   
   North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has refused to give up development of nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States in spite of increasingly severe U.N. sanctions, raising fears of a new war on the Korean peninsula. The North has fired test-fired missiles over Japan. 
   
   Earlier on Wednesday, state media warned the U.S. of “meddling” in inter-Korean issues at a time when it had to “mind its own destiny rushing headlong into self-destruction”. 
   
   South Korea's Jong Ah Park and Quinnipiac University's Melissa Samoskevich reach for the puck during an Olympic preparation, women's ice hockey game for South Korea in Hamden, Connecticut, U.S., December 28, 2017. Picture taken December 28, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder 
   
   “The U.S. is miscalculating,” the North’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary. “Although the U.S. makes desperate efforts to disturb peace while wielding a nuclear stick, it can not provoke us as long as we have the strong nuclear deterrent”. 
   
   ICY RECEPTION 
   
   Seoul has proposed a joint ice hockey team, which triggered an angry response from athletes in the South suddenly being told they may have to play alongside total strangers. 
   
   “I don’t know if it will happen, but a joint team will be a good opportunity for ice hockey to shed its sorrow as a less-preferred sport as many Koreans will take interest,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in told players during a visit to a training center. 
   
   The number of petitions to the presidential Blue House’s website opposing a unified team shot up to more than 100 this week, with the most popular one garnering more than 17,000 votes. 
   
   “This isn’t the same as gluing a broken plate together,” said one of the signers. 
   
   The prospect of a combined team had long been unsettling for the South Korean players. As in most other winter sports, the South is much stronger than the North. 
   
   “Our players were really nervous,” Sarah Murray, South Korean women’s hockey head coach, told Reuters last month during the team’s training swing through the United States. 
   
   “We can only take 23 players to the Olympics, and they thought these North Koreans are going to come in and take our spots”, Murray said. 
   
   Chun, the South’s lead delegate, said the decision on a united ice hockey team is not yet finalised, as it requires the consent of the IOC and related international body. 
   
   “We’re well aware of the people’s concerns and interests about this”, he told a news conference. 
   
   “But I would like you to see the other side that it could make a positive contribution to peace of the Korean Peninsula and improving inter-Korean relations”. 
   
   On Tuesday, the North said a 140-person orchestra would perform in South Korea during the Games. Pyongyang is also planning to send a large delegation in addition to the athletes and orchestra. 
   
   Paik Hak-soon, the director of the Center for North Korean studies at Sejong Institute in South Korea, said North Korea was using the cheering squad to draw attention to its apparent cooperative spirit. 
   
   “Seeing good results in competitions thanks to the cheering squad would enable the North Koreans to say they contributed to a successful Olympics and the South Korean government would likely agree,” said Paik. 
   
   Slideshow (5 Images) 
   
   “In the end, they are using this old tactic to get to Washington through Seoul.” 
   
   Reclusive North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy the South, Japan and their major ally, the United States. 
   
   China, which did not attend the Vancouver meeting, said on Wednesday the gathering showed a Cold War mentality and would only undermine a settlement of the North Korea problem. ||||| North and South Korea will march under one flag as their first joint Olympic team competes in the winter games next month. 
   
   At the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, the teams will march together under the Unification Flag, which features the entire peninsula and surrounding islands in blue on a white background. 
   
   It was last used in 2006 at the Winter Olympics in Italy. 
   
   It comes as the countries announced they will field a joint women's ice hockey team at the Winter Olympics in February. 
   
   North Korea will send a 550-member delegation to the games, which includes 230 cheerleaders, 140 artists and 30 taekwondo players for a demonstration. 
   
   They will begin arriving in South Korea on 25 January. 
   
   Image: The teams march under one flag at the East Asian Games in 2005 
   
   Officials have also agreed that a 140-piece orchestra from North Korea will perform in the South during the Olympics. 
   
   North and South Korea are still technically at war with each other, as the 1950-53 conflict between the two states ended in a truce, not peace. 
   
   Representatives from both countries have been talking with each other since last week, after more than two years of silence. 
   
   Image: North Koreans (red shirts) cheer as South Koreans (yellow shirts) wave unified Korean peninsula flags in 2003 
   
   The move also follows heightened tensions over the North's missile tests, nuclear weapons programme and its regular threats to destroy its neighbours. 
   
   Despite a slight thawing of tensions, Japan has warned that the world should not be naive about the North's "charm offensive". 
   
   "It is not the time to ease pressure or to reward North Korea," foreign minister Taro Kono said. 
   
   "The fact that North Korea is engaging in dialogue could be interpreted as proof that the sanctions are working." 
   
   Reaction to news of a joint Olympic team has been mixed in North Korea, with some athletes not happy about competing with their neighbours. 
   
   More than 100 petitions have been sent to South Korea's presidential Blue House website opposing a joint Olympics team. 
   
   Image: North Korean Jon Jong Su crosses the border to attend talks at the truce village of Panmunjom 
   
   The most popular has more than 11,000 signatures, with one person writing: "This isn't the same as gluing a broken plate together". 
   
   North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the relationship between the North and the South was "going towards detente". 
   
   But it criticised Japan's leader for refusing to ease the pressure on Pyongyang without the latter taking steps towards de-nuclearisation. 
   
   It said: "The detente on the Korean peninsula is unfavourable for the (Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe group whose ultimate goal is to convert Japan into a war state. 
   
   "That is why they persist in their policy to stifle the DPRK (North Korea)."
target: – North and South Korea will compete together under one unified flag at next month's Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, in what will be the first such arrangement since 2006. South Korea previously announced North Korea would send officials, athletes, and a cheer squad to the Olympics following talks between the two countries. It has now revealed North Korea's intention to send a 550-member delegation. Among those arriving in South Korea beginning on Jan. 25 will be female ice hockey players joining a team of South Korean athletes (they'll compete under a flag showing the Korean Peninsula in blue on a white background), as well as 230 cheerleaders, 140 orchestra members, and 30 people who will take part in a taekwondo demonstration, report Sky News and CNN. Ahead of the Olympics, skiers from both countries will also train together in North Korea, per CNN. The thawing of relations between the North and South has drawn praise from some. But others, like Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono, fear Kim Jong Un only hopes to ease international pressure while continuing to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal. "It is not the time to ease pressure, or to reward North Korea," Kono said Tuesday in Vancouver, Canada, where 20 countries met and agreed to consider tougher sanctions on the North, per Reuters. Warning countries not to be fooled by its "charm offensive," Kono added, "The fact that North Korea is engaging in dialogue could be interpreted as proof that the sanctions are working." China avoided the meeting, saying it showed a "Cold War mentality."