South Korea calls for North Korea summit ahead of Donald Trump's visit to Seoul

At a meeting in Washington, Stephen Biegun, United States Special Representative for North Korea, said that the United States had no preconditions for new negotiations with North Korea, which had been blocked since the failure of the summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February .

Washington:

South Korea called on Wednesday for North Korea to hold another summit with its leader before the visit of the american president Donald Trump in Seoul next week, while the United States said that his door remained "wide open" for negotiations with Pyongyang.

At a meeting in Washington, Stephen Biegun, United States Special Representative for North Korea, said that the United States had no preconditions for new negotiations with North Korea, which had been blocked since the failure of the summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February .

"The door is wide open to negotiations and ... ..) we hope and hope that in the not too distant future, we will again be engaged in this process substantially", he said.

Mr. Biegun stated that the United States was willing to discuss all the commitments made by the two leaders during a summit in Singapore last year, which included security guarantees for North Korea. However, he stressed that progress would require "meaningful and verifiable" measures by North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme.

Speaking at the same Atlantic Council meeting, his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-Hoon, called for a fourth summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

"I urge North Korea to respond to President Moon's exceptional invitation to host an inter-Korean summit, if possible, before President Trump visits Korea next week," said Lee.

Trump is scheduled to travel to Seoul next week for meetings with Moon after attending G20 meetings in Japan.

The Hanoi Trump summit with Kim tarnished after the two sides failed to reconcile North Korea's US demands to abandon nuclear weapons with North Korean demands to lift US-imposed international sanctions.

North Korea has not responded to repeated requests from the United States and South Korea to resume talks from Hanoi, although Mr. Trump said last week that he had received a "beautiful" letter from Kim. Trump said he thought something positive would happen in Pyongyang, but gave no details and said he was not in a hurry to negotiate.

Washington gave no sign of willingness to lift sanctions and announced on Wednesday punitive measures against a Russian financial institution for allegedly helping North Korea escape financial sanctions by helping a company related to Pyongyang's main foreign exchange bank.

Mr. Biegun, who spoke before the announcement, stressed the positive role that Russia and China have played in persuading North Korea to renounce its nuclear weapons, and said that he "had every hope" that Chinese President Xi Jinping would send constructive messages to the press. question during a visit to Pyongyang this week.

Biegun said that Washington and Pyongyang understood the need for flexibility in their nuclear negotiations, but stressed that active North Korean negotiators should be empowered to discuss denuclearization, which was not the case in Hanoi.

"We are ready to adopt all the initiatives to which our two leaders have committed themselves, but we must discuss them all," he said. "We cannot move forward without meaningful and verifiable denuclearization measures. This is absolutely the heart of the thing, this is what produced this moment to begin with."

Biegun said that although there have been no ongoing negotiations with North Korea since Hanoi, there have been "many communications between our governments".