.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he planned to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month or in early June and hoped the discussions would ultimately lead to an end of the North’s nuclear weapons program.
“We’ll be meeting with them sometime in May or early June and I think there’ll be great respect paid by both parties and hopefully we’ll be able to make a deal on the de-nuking of North Korea,” Trump told reporters at the beginning of a Cabinet meeting.
“They’ve said so. We’ve said so,” Trump said. “Hopefully, it’ll be a relationship that’s much different than it’s been for many, many years.”
Trump’s comments came just a few hours before North Korea mentioned talks with the United States and South Korea for the first time, as the North’s state media said Kim Jong Un chaired a party meeting on Monday in which he assessed future talks with Washington and his upcoming summit with South Korea on April 27.
“(Kim Jong Un) set forth the strategic and tactical issues to be maintained by the Workers’ Party of Korea including the future policy of international relations and the orientation corresponding to them,” the North’s central news agency said on Tuesday.
Any meeting between Kim and Trump would come after the two Koreas hold their first summit in more than a decade later this month.
North Korea has told the United States it is prepared to discuss the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula when Kimmeets Trump, a U.S. official told Reuters on Sunday.