South Korea Finally Arrests Impeached President Yoon Suk-Yeol for Insurrection

It’s the end of a standoff that had veered from the bizarre to the downright embarrassing. Early on Wednesday morning, hundreds of investigators finally entered the fortified compound in Seoul where South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol had been holed up since his mid-December impeachment over an earlier declaration of martial law that prosecutors contend amounted to insurrection.

In executing their arrest warrant—the first against a sitting South Korean President—law enforcement officials avoided a repeat of tense scenes from Jan. 3, when they were blocked from detaining Yoon for five-and-a-half hours by his security staff, before finally beating a chastening retreat. In agreeing to comply with investigators, Yoon remained defiant, insisting in a video message that he had yielded simply to “avoid bloodshed” following earlier clashes between police and his supporters.

“President Yoon has decided to personally appear at the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) today,” Yoon’s lawyer, Seok Dong-hyeon, posted on Facebook. TV footage showed a convoy of vehicles leaving the presidential residence. Yoon can be detained and questioned for 48 hours, according to South Korean law, a period which also covers a scheduled court appearance.

Yoon’s detention marks the latest chapter in a bewildering series of events following his martial law decree on Dec. 3—when he became the first South Korean leader to place his country under military rule since democratization in the late 1980s. The opposition-led National Assembly quickly voted down that move, prompting the embattled President to send armed troops to attempt to seize the legislature and detain his political adversaries. Prosecutors allege this amounts to insurrection—a crime in South Korea punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

Ever since, Yoon has been sequestered behind rolls of barbed wire at his hilltop fortress within Seoul’s tony Hannam-dong district, dubbed “Korea’s Beverly Hills,” whose residents include tycoons and K-pop royalty. Yoon is the first South Korean in modern times to refuse to reside at the centuries-old Blue House, decrying it as a symbol of imperial decadence, and instead controversially renovating the former Foreign Minister’s residence at great expense.

What comes next is unclear. While the criminal investigation into Yoon progresses, the nation’s Constitutional Court is deliberating whether the impeachment vote and his removal from office were legitimate. Whatever the final outcome, the saga has rocked South Korean politics and sparked consternation among allies including the U.S. at a time when regional power dynamics are shifting.

Arch-nemesis North Korea has been dispatching troops to help Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and honing its ballistic missile capability, while China is drastically building up its military might. At the same time, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of the nation’s East Asian alliances.

Other than Yoon, high-ranking officials under investigation include the former defense minister, the head of the Army Special Warfare Command, as well as the head of the Defense Intelligence Command, raising huge questions over the nation's security preparedness. 

Ongoing turmoil in South Korea is “to their advantage,” Daniel Pinkston, a visiting professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, says of China and North Korea. “The question is how much they would wish to exploit it.”

Yoon’s impeachment has also been hugely divisive domestically. As officers with “police” and “CIO” on their jackets used ladders to climb over buses that blocked the road into Yoon’s residential compound and attempted to gain entry via a nearby hiking trail, scores of his supporters gathered at the entrance gate hurling abuse. Many brandished U.S. flags and banners demanding “CCP out” in reference to debunked claims of electoral manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, a group of anti-Yoon protesters cheered the authorities on as they entered the compound.

To this day, observers remain at a loss regarding the purpose of Yoon’s aborted power-grab. Representing the conservative People Power Party, he was already a lame-duck President after the opposition Democratic Party won a legislative majority in elections earlier this year. His scandal-ridden five-year term was set to end in 2027, with no possibility of reelection due to term limits, though he chose to plunge South Korea into its worst political crisis in decades, rekindling the memory of the dark days of military rule and shaking the foundations of this vibrant democracy of 50 million people.

“Everyone is still scratching our collective heads,” says Pinkston. “What’s the logic? What’s the end game? There was no good outcome. It’s just baffling.”