North Korea refused to accept Trump's letter to Kim: report
KYODO NEWS - 8 hours ago - 21:26 | All, World
North Korea has refused to accept U.S. President Donald Trump's letter to leader Kim Jong Un, a report said Wednesday, citing an informed high-level source.
NK News, a website that provides news and analysis on North Korea, quoted the source as saying that Trump drafted the letter to Kim with the aim of resuming bilateral talks, which have been suspended for more than five years.
The United States attempted to deliver the letter multiple times through North Korean diplomats stationed at the U.N. headquarters in New York, but they "bluntly" refused, the source was also quoted as saying. The timing remains unclear.
The United States and North Korea remain technically in a state of war, as the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. They have no official diplomatic relations.
At their first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit in June 2018 in Singapore, Trump and Kim agreed that Washington would provide security guarantees to Pyongyang in exchange for the "complete" denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Later, they fell short of bridging the gap between demands by the United States and North Korea's calls for sanctions relief at their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019.
After Trump and Kim surprisingly met in June that year at the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, the United States and North Korea held a working-level meeting in Stockholm in October 2019, but that ended without progress.
Related coverage:
Trump says U.S. communicating with North Korea
North Korea raps U.S., Japan, South Korea for inflaming regional tensions
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