SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea’s spy agency sees a high possibility that North Korea and the United States will hold a summit, anticipating the meeting could happen after joint U.S.-South Korea military drills in March next year, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
“The NIS believes that Kim Jong Un is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States and will have contact with the United States in the future when conditions are met,” lawmaker Lee Seong-kweun told reporters, after a parliamentary audit on the National Intelligence Service, according to the report.
North Korean leader Kim has said he would be willing to talk to the U.S. if Washington dropped demands for denuclearisation, but he did not publicly respond when U.S. President Donald Trump offered to hold talks during his visit to South Korea last week.
Trump told reporters last week as he visited South Korea ahead of the APEC summit: “we’ll come back, and we’ll, at some point in the not-too-distant future, meet with North Korea.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the possibility of a summit.
Trump and Kim held summits in 2018 and 2019 before negotiations broke down over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons arsenal. North Korea is under heavy international sanctions over those weapons, as well as its ballistic missiles.
Kim does not seem to have any major health issue after suggestions he may be suffering from high blood pressure, another lawmaker told reporters, after the parliamentary session, Yonhap said.
Kim Ju Ae, the North Korean leader’s teenage daughter, is solidifying her position as his likely successor, but has kept a low profile over the past 60 days to avoid taking the spotlight from her father, the lawmaker said.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Trevor HunnicuttEditing by Ed Davies)
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