US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would like to see North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this weekend at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, and North Korea said a meeting would be “meaningful” if it happened.
Trump, who was in Osaka, Japan, for a Group of 20 summit, arrived in South Korea later on Saturday. He is scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday.
If Trump and Kim were to meet, it would be for the third time in just over a year, and four months since their second summit, in Vietnam, broke down with no progress on US efforts to press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
Trump made the offer to meet Kim in a comment on Twitter about his trip to South Korea.
“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” he said.
Trump later told reporters his offer to Kim was a spur-of-the-moment idea: “I just thought of it this morning.”
“If he’s there, we’ll see each other for two minutes, that’s all we can, but that will be fine,” he said, adding he and Kim “get along very well”.
A senior North Korean official said a summit between Trump and Kim in the DMZ would be “meaningful” in advancing relations.
“We see it as a very interesting suggestion, but we have not received an official proposal in this regard,” Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s first vice-minister of foreign affairs said in a statement, state news agency KCNA said.
“I am of the view that if the DPRK-US summit meetings take place on the division line, as is intended by President Trump, it would serve as another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations,” Choe said.
She was referring to North Korea by its official name – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Later, Trump told a news conference, “We may be meeting with Chairman Kim…Kim Jong Un was very receptive.”
He added, “We won’t call it a summit. We’ll call it a handshake,” and said he would be very comfortable stepping over the border into North Korea if he met Kim at the DMZ.
US special envoy Stephen Biegun said on Friday the United States was ready to hold constructive talks with North Korea to follow through on a denuclearization agreement reached by the two countries last year, South Korea’s foreign ministry said.
Biegun told his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that Washington wanted to make “simultaneous, parallel” progress on the agreement reached at a summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June last year, the ministry said in a statement.
Both sides had agreed to establish new relations and work towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
But negotiations have stalled since their second summit in Vietnam in February collapsed as the two sides failed to narrow differences between U.S. calls for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.
South Korea’s presidential office said nothing was confirmed with regards to a Trump, Kim meeting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit that Kim had told him in April security guarantees were key, and that corresponding measures were needed to realize denuclearization, South Korea’s presidential office said.
Meeting Trump in Osaka, Chinese President Xi Jinping said he hopes the United States and North Korea can show flexibility, resume talks as soon as possible, and find a way to resolve each other’s concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry said.
