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US, N. Korea to continue summit talks next week: Seoul
SEOUL, Feb 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The United States and North Korea will hold
further talks next week to prepare for a second summit between President
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un later this month, Seoul said Sunday.
The news comes after a day after Stephen Biegun, the US Special
Representative for North Korea, said more dialogue was needed ahead of the
summit scheduled in Vietnam.
“North Korea and the US have agreed to continue negotiations in a third
country in Asia during the week of February 17,” Seoul’s presidential
spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom told reporters.
He did not provide further details.
Biegun travelled to Pyongyang earlier this month for three days of
preparatory meetings with North Korean officials, with the State Department
saying the talks focused on Trump and Kim’s “commitments of complete
denuclearisation, transforming US-DPRK relations and building a lasting peace
on the Korean Peninsula”.
Trump and Kim are due to meet in Hanoi from February 27 to 28 following
their landmark first summit in Singapore last June. That meeting — the
first-ever between the leaders of the US and North Korea — produced a
vaguely-worded document in which Kim pledged to work towards “the
denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.
But progress has since stalled with the two sides disagreeing over what
that means and analysts say tangible progress on denuclearisation will be
needed for the second summit if it is to avoid being dismissed as “reality
TV”.
Trump’s own intelligence chief, Dan Coats, have expressed scepticism over
the North’s denuclearisation, and told the Senate Intelligence Committee that
Pyongyang was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons”.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1414 hrs