North Korea says new US sanctions could stall disarmament talks
North Korea condemned the US over its latest sanctions, warning Washington’s approach could block the path to ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.
Washington last week added three senior North Korean officials to its sanctions list for human-rights abuses, including Choe Ryong-hae, considered a right-hand man to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Progress has stalled in talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal since the Singapore summit in June between Mr Kim and US President Donald Trump.
There the two men signed a statement on ending the North’s nuclear programme, but have since disagreed on what it means.
Now Pyongyang is demanding sanctions relief and condemning US insistence on its nuclear disarmament as “gangsterlike”, while Washington is pushing to maintain sanctions against the North until its “final, fully verified denuclearisation”.
The North said Mr Trump had repeatedly expressed his desire to improve relations with Pyongyang, but the US State Department was “bent on bringing relations back to the status of last year, which was marked by exchanges of fire”.
In recent months, highranking US politicians, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, had “almost every day slandered the DPRK out of sheer malice”, a director of the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for American Studies said.
A second summit between Mr Trump and Mr Kim, who exchanged personal insults and threats of war throughout last year, is expected in 2019.
Mr Trump is facing criticism over the planned talks because North Korea has taken few concrete steps to abandon its nuclear and ballistic-missile programmes.
Pyongyang has long said it needs the weapons to deter a possible US invasion and has spent decades developing them, at a heavy cost in resources and UN, US and EU sanctions.
Mr Trump on Friday played down hopes for any imminent deal to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arsenal.