Ivanka Trump and North Korean general at Olympic closing event

US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka will come face-to-face with a senior North Korean general at the Winter Olympics closing ceremony in the South this weekend, it emerged yesterday.

The Pyeongchang Games have become a venue for geopolitics as much as sports as the North mounts a charm offensive analysts claim is intended to ease the sanctions against it and weaken ties between Seoul and the United States.

Leader Kim Jong-un sent his sister Kim Yo-jong to the opening ceremony – which US Vice President Mike Pence also attended – and during her visit Ms Kim invited South Korean President Moon Jae-in to a summit in Pyongyang.

The family connections will be reversed at Sunday’s closing ceremony.

The White House said Mr Trump had asked his eldest daughter – who is also one of his senior advisers – to travel to Pyeongchang to lead a “high-level delegation”.

The 36-year-old businesswoman and former model will be joined by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and is going in part because “she is something of a winter sports enthusiast”, an official said.

The North will send an eight-member delegation on Sunday headed by Kim Yongchol, a senior general who oversees inter-Korean relations for the ruling Workers’ Party.

Gen Kim’s presence is a demonstration of how Pyongyang is testing the limits of the sanctions imposed on it in connection with its banned nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.

The general is blacklisted under Seoul’s unilateral sanctions against the North.

He is believed to have once led the North’s spying agency and to have ordered a torpedo attack on the South’s corvette Cheonan in 2010 that left 46 sailors dead.

Seoul blamed the North for the attack but Pyongyang denied involvement.

South Korea’s defence ministry has also linked him to the shelling of its Yeonpyeong island the same year, which killed four people.

The reputation of Gen Kim Yong-chol suggests soft power politics have not been his forte