TOKYO — North Korea and the United States will resume negotiations Saturday, marking the first official talks between the two sides since President Donald Trump met Kim Jong in June, the North Korean government announced Tuesday.
State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus later told reporters that officials from the two countries plan to meet “within the next week.”
North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said the two countries “agreed to hold a working-level discussion on October 5th, following a preliminary contact on the 4th,” according to a statement carried by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Choe’s statement did not say where the talks would take place.
Negotiations between the two countries’ diplomats have been frozen since the breakdown of a summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February. Another meeting between the two leaders at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas in June was supposed to lead to a resumption of negotiations, but the stalemate persisted until now.
Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted a series of short-range ballistic missile tests, while complaining bitterly about joint military exercises carried out by the United States and South Korea.
On Monday, North Korea blamed the stalling of the dialogue on Washington and Seoul, accusing them of failing to keep their promises. North Korean Ambassador Kim Song told the U.N. General Assembly that it was up to the United States whether negotiations “will become a window of opportunity or an occasion that will hasten the crisis.”