South Korea's chief nuclear envoy will visit Washington this week for talks over the Korean Peninsula affairs, Seoul's foreign ministry said Monday, reports Trend referring to Xnhuanet.com.
Lee Do-hoon, South Korea's special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, will make a four-day visit to Washington from Monday to meet with Stephen Biegun, U.S. special representative for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) affairs.
During the meeting, Lee and Biegun will discuss ways to cooperate between Seoul and Washington for the complete denuclearization of and the permanent peace settlement in the Korean Peninsula, the Seoul ministry said.
Lee will also hold a bilateral meeting with Takizaki Shigeki, director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry's Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau who will visit Washington during the same period as Lee's trip, as well as a trilateral meeting including Biegun.
The series of meetings would come after the DPRK-U.S. working-level nuclearization talks were held in the Swedish capital of Stockholm on Saturday.
Kim Myong Gil, the DPRK delegation's chief negotiator, said after the eight and a half hours of talks with the U.S. side that the negotiations broke down "entirely because the United States has not discarded its old stance and attitude" and came to a negotiating table with an "empty hand."
The U.S. State Department said its delegation had "good discussions" with its DPRK counterpart, expecting to return to the working-level talks in two weeks.
The DPRK-U.S. denuclearization talks have hit a stalemate since the second summit between top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump ended without any agreement in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in late February. The two leaders first met in Singapore in June 2018.
In an impromptu meeting in late June at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom, Kim and Trump agreed to resume the working-level dialogue.