U.S. President Donald Trump gesture with a thumbs-up as he arrives at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 28, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
June 28, 2019
OSAKA (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would like to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this weekend at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the border of North and South Korea.
Trump, who is in Osaka, Japan, for the Group of 20 Summit, is due to arrive in South Korea later on Saturday. He is scheduled to leave the country on Sunday and return to Washington.
“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” Trump said on Twitter.
The White House on Friday declined to comment on whether Trump was scheduled to go the DMZ.
U.S. special envoy Stephen Biegun said on Friday the United States was ready to hold constructive talks with North Korea to follow through on a denuclearization agreement reached by the two countries last year, South Korea’s foreign ministry said.
Biegun told his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that Washington wanted to make “simultaneous, parallel” progress on the agreement reached at a summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore last year, the ministry said in a statement.
Both sides agreed to establish new relations and work towards denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
But negotiations have stalled since a second summit in Vietnam in February collapsed as the two sides failed to narrow differences between U.S. calls for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; writing by Eric Beech, editing by G Crosse)
