North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for the succession of war spirit as he visited a national cemetery in Pyongyang on Sunday to mark the end of the Korean War six decades ago, according to the country's state news agency.

Kim paid tribute to fallen soldiers at the Fatherland Liberation War Martyrs Cemetery on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the 1953 armistice that ended the three-year conflict, the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a Monday report.

The cemetery, established last July on Kim's instruction, is similar to Seoul National Cemetery in South Korea and Arlington National Cemetery in the United States.

A floral basket in Kim's name was placed before the cemetery and the leader, together with other visitors, paid silent tribute to those who perished during the war, the KCNA said.

The communist nation formally describes the Korean War as the Fatherland Liberation War and claims itself to be victorious. The war came to an end with a truce, resulting in the division of the peninsula.

Kim stressed that the North's participants in the war should be respected as "revolutionary forerunners and glorify their revolutionary spirit and feats generation after generation," the KCNA said in the English-language report.

Such war spirit "serves as a valuable mental legacy of the Korean revolution, underlining the need to deeply instill the popular heroism and patriotic spirit displayed by the army and people of the DPRK (North Korea) in the war into the youth and children and people," he was quoted as saying.

On the eve of the Armistice Day, meanwhile, Kim observed the test-firing of a short-range ballistic missile from a site close to the inter-Korean border, according to the North's media. The rocket flew across North Korea and fell into the East Sea, South Korean military officials said. (Yonhap)