The leaders of North and South Korea will hold their third summit in Pyongyang from September 18-20.
Chung Eui-yong, the national security advisor to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, announced the dates Thursday in Seoul, a day after he led a delegation to the North Korean capital to finalize the arrangements. Chung said President Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will focus on specific measures to achieve denuclearization.
Chung personally delivered a letter from Moon to Kim during the trip.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency issued a statement Thursday saying it is Kim Jong Un’s “will to completely remove the danger of armed conflict and horror of war from the Korean peninsula and turn it into the cradle of peace without nuclear weapons and free from nuclear threat.”
The summit will be the third between Moon and Kim this year; the previous two were held in Panmunjon, the truce village in the border zone that separates the autocratic North from the democratic South.
The talks come amid a heated stalemate between the North and the United States over the pace of North Korea ending its nuclear and missile development programs, which the two sides agreed to during the historic meeting in April between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Singapore.
The impasse led President Trump to cancel Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea last month.
But Chung Eui-yong told reporters that Kim said his faith in Trump is “unchanged” and is aiming to both denuclearize and ending the hostilities between Pyongyang and Washington before Trump’s term in office ends in January 2021.
“Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims ‘unwavering faith in President Trump.’ Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!,” Trump responded Thursday on Twitter.
During a meeting with his aides later Thursday, President Moon said he had high expectations that his next summit with Kim accelerate talks between the U.S. and North Korea that will lead to the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
During their first summit in April, Moon and Kim agreed to seek a formal end to 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with a truce rather than a peace treaty, leaving the sides in a technical state of war. But Washington is demanding that Pyongyang completely abandon its nuclear weapons program ahead of any formal peace deal, while North Korea wants the U.S. to remove all its troops from the Korean Peninsula
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