During their latest meeting in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to keep negotiating on ways to improve bilateral relations, North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA said on Friday, Trend reports referring to TASS.
On the second day of the summit, Kim Jong Un met again with US President Donald Trump at Metropole Hotel in Hanoi one-on-one, before having extended talks with their aides attending.
The agency’s detailed report of the meeting says the two leaders began the talks with appreciating "a remarkable progress", which "has been made in the historic course of implementing the Singapore joint statement."
The two leaders held "a constructive and candid exchange of their opinions over the practical issues arising in opening up a new era of the improvement of the DPRK-U.S. relations on the basis of the progress."
"At the talks they shared the common understanding that the efforts made by the two sides and proactive measures taken by them to defuse tensions and preserve peace on the Korean peninsula and completely denuclearize it were of great significance in building mutual trust and making a fundamental turn in the decades-long bilateral relations characterized by mistrust and antagonism," KCNA said.
Besides, Kim Jong Un and Trump "listened to each other's views on the issues to be resolved without fail at the present phase in order to carry out the joint goals specified in the Singapore joint statement, and had an in-depth discussion of the ways to do so."
According to KCNA, the two leaders "appreciated that the second meeting in Hanoi offered an important occasion for deepening mutual respect and trust and putting the relations between the two countries on a new stage" and "agreed to keep in close touch with each other for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and the epochal development of the DPRK-U.S. relations in the future, too, and continue productive dialogues for settling the issues discussed at the Hanoi Summit."
The agency said that Kim Jong Un and Trump agreed to hold another meeting in order to continue fruitful negotiations.
However, the agency made no mention of the fact that contrary to initial plans, the Hanoi summit produced no joint declaration. Following several meetings in Hanoi, Kim Jong Un and Trump chose not to sign a bilateral document, agreeing to continue the dialogue instead.
Commenting on the results of the summit, Trump told reporters that the North Korean side was seeking the cancellation of all sanctions in exchange for dismantling the nuclear facility in Yongbyon. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, in his turn, said that Pyongyang had requested Washington partially remove sanctions, particularly those affecting civilian industries and common people, but not all of them as the US leader had stated.
The first summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump took place in Singapore on June 12, 2018. The parties signed a joint document, in which Pyongyang committed to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula in return for US security guarantees.