South Korea to hold meeting of diplomatic missions next week
South Korea will open an annual meeting of its top envoys abroad next week with a focus on strengthening its diplomacy amid geopolitical challenges, the foreign ministry said on Thursday.
Ahead of Pyongyang’s year-end deadline for Washington to show flexibility to advance their nuclear talks, US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Beigun will arrive in South Korea on Sunday, according to Foreign ministry.
Beigun three-day official visit will be starting from Sunday, the visit will come amid rising tensions in the wake of Pyongyang’s apparent rocket engine test last week and Washington’s subsequent warnings against additional “hostile” acts, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Biegun’s planned trip has spawned speculation that he could visit the inter-Korean border truce village of Panmunjom for possible contact with North Koreans.
Advertisement
But it remains to be seen whether such contact can materialize with no sign of either side ceding ground.
Last week, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed to maintain momentum for dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.
North Korea launched two “unidentified projectiles” on the Thanksgiving holiday in the US as nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington remain deadlocked.
Kim and US President Donald Trump adopted a vaguely-worded statement on the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” at their first summit in Singapore in June last year, but little progress has since been made.
In August this year, North Korea fired two unidentified projectiles into the East Sea.
North Korea is under multiple sets of international sanctions over its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes and lifting some of them was a key demand at the Hanoi summit.
Advertisement
