Kim now makes the Russian connection
moscow — North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un will visit Russia for talks with Vladimir Putin this month, the Kremlin said on Thursday, as tensions between Washington and Pyongyang spiked higher.
The Kremlin announced the talks just hours after North Korea launched a blistering attack on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, demanding he be removed from negotiations over its banned nuclear programme.
Pyongyang also claimed to have tested a new kind of weapon with a “powerful warhead”.
The Kim-Putin meeting would be the first between the two leaders, as Moscow seeks to play a role in another global flashpoint.
The Kremlin said Putin had invited Kim and that the meeting would take place “in the second half of April” but provided no further details. —
seoul — North Korea said on Thursday it no longer wanted to deal with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and said he should be replaced in talks by someone more mature, hours after it announced its first weapons test since nuclear talks broke down.
The North’s official KCNA news agency quoted senior foreign ministry official Kwon Jong Gun as warning that no one could predict the situation on the Korean peninsula if the United States did not abandon the “root cause” that compelled North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.
The statement came shortly after North Korea announced that leader Kim Jong-un had overseen the testing of a new tactical guided weapon, which KCNA said has a “peculiar mode of guiding flight” and “a powerful warhead.”
It was the North’s first weapon test since talks in Vietnam between Kim and US President Donald Trump in late February broke down over conflicting demands by North Korea for sanctions relief and by the United States for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.
KCNA gave no details on the weapon that was tested on Wednesday but “tactical” implied a shortrange weapon rather than the longrange ballistic missiles that have been seen as a threat to the United States. KCNA quoted Kwon, who is in charge of US affairs, as saying the Vietnam summit, the second between the two leaders, showed that talks could go wrong “whenever Pompeo pokes his nose in.”
“I am afraid that, if Pompeo engages in the talks again, the table will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled,” Kwon said.
“Therefore, even in the case of possible resumption of the dialogue with the United States, I wish our dialogue counterpart would be not Pompeo but other person who is more careful and mature in communicating with us.”
A spokeswoman for the State Department said it was aware of the report about Pompeo and added: “The United States remains ready to engage North Korea in a constructive negotiation.”
I am afraid that, if Pompeo engages in the talks again, the table will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled
Kwon Jong Gun, N. Korean official