North Korea said yesterday it had turned down a US offer for fresh talks next month, saying it was not interested in more talks merely aimed at “appeasing us” ahead of a year-end deadline Pyongyang has set for Washington to show more flexibility in the negotiations.
Kim Myong Gil, the North’s nuclear negotiator, said in a report carried by state media that Stephen Biegun, his US counterpart who jointly led last month’s failed denuclearisation talks in Stockholm, had offered through a third country to meet again.
Kim and Biegun met last month in the Swedish capital for the first time since US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed in June to re-open negotiations that have been stalled since a failed summit in Vietnam in February.
But the Stockholm meeting fell apart, with Kim Myong Gil saying the US side had failed to present a new approach.
“If the negotiated solution of issues is possible, we are ready to meet with the US at any place and any time,” Kim Myong Gil said.
But he called Biegun’s proposal a “sinister aim of appeasing us in a bid to pass with ease” Pyongyang’s year-end deadline. “We have no willingness to have such negotiations.”
North Korea has been seeking a lifting of punishing sanctions, but the US has insisted Kim Jong Un must dismantle his nuclear weapons programme first.