North Korea remains willing to hold dialogue with the United States “anytime and in any format”, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan said.
“Our commitment to doing our best for the sake of peace and stability for the world and the Korean Peninsula remains unchanged, and we are open-minded in giving time and opportunity to the U.S.,” Kim said in a statement carried by the North’s state-run KCNA news agency.
The report was published hours after U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned his plan to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for denuclearization talks in Singapore on June 12, blaming the latter’s “tremendous anger and open hostility”.
Pyongyang had returned to threats of nuclear war via another senior official Thursday, warning Washington that the U.S. should back away from its insistence that the North agree to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.
“The tremendous anger and open hostility that President Trump mentioned is just a backlash in response to a unilateral denuclearization being pushed ahead of the planned North-U.S. summit,” Vice Minister Kim explained.
A separate KCNA report Friday celebrated the previous day’s demolition of North Korea’s nuclear test site as “a vivid manifestation of the [North Korean] government’s fixed peace-loving stand”.
Meanwhile, South Korean President Moon Jae-in called on Trump and Kim to talk directly to avoid any communication mix-up.
“I am very perplexed and it is very regrettable that the North Korea-U.S. summit will not be held on June 12 when it was scheduled to be held,” Moon said at an emergency government meeting early Friday, according to local news agency Yonhap.
The South’s leader secured Kim’s promise to pursue peace and denuclearization at a breakthrough inter-Korean summit on April 27.
Moon was also in Washington earlier this week for talks apparently aimed at helping Trump prepare to meet his North Korean counterpart.
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