(BSS/AFP) - North Korea will launch its "toughest" ever strategy to counter the United States, state media said Sunday, reporting on a key year-end party meeting overseen by leader Kim Jong Un.

The nuclear-armed state held a five-day party meeting last week as part of a drive to chart the country`s course for 2025, the official Korean Central News Agency reported in a lengthy English dispatch.

"The US is the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy," the report said.

It slammed growing ties between South Korea, the US and Japan, saying it had "expanded into a nuclear military bloc for aggression".

It also said South Korea had "turned into an out-and-out anti-communist outpost of the US".

"This reality clearly shows to which direction we should advance and what we should do and how," KCNA said.

Against this backdrop, Kim`s speech to top officials "clarified the strategy for the toughest anti-US counteraction to be launched aggressively", the report said without providing details.

The meeting reviewed the response to widespread flooding earlier this year, and also included a vow to boost ties with "friendly" countries.

Such party meetings, and Kim`s speeches to officials, are typically used by Pyongyang to make key policy announcements.

The KCNA report comes after Seoul`s military claimed that more than a thousand North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded since they entered combat in Ukraine as part of a military deal between Pyongyang and Moscow.

North Korea and Russia have strengthened their military ties since Moscow`s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

A landmark defence pact between Pyongyang and Moscow -- signed in June when Russian President Vladimir Putin North Korea -- came into force this month.

Putin hailed it as a "breakthrough document".

North Korean state media said Friday that Putin sent a New Year`s message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying, "the bilateral ties between our two countries have been elevated after our talks in June in Pyongyang".

Ukraine`s allies have called Pyongyang`s growing involvement in Russia`s war in Ukraine a "dangerous expansion" of the conflict.