North Korea says U.S. must recognize it as nuclear state to resume talks
Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a senior ruling party official, said in a statement carried by state-run media that "the recognition of the irreversible position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state...should be a prerequisite for predicting and thinking everything in the future."
DPRK is the acronym for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
While recognizing that the personal relationship between Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump "is not bad," Kim Yo Jong insisted an attempt by Washington to use it to denuclearize North Korea would be interpreted as "a mockery," according to the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
"If the United States fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-U.S. meeting will remain as a 'hope' of the U.S. side," she said.
At the 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.
But they were unable to bridge the gap between U.S. demands and North Korea's call for sanctions relief at their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019.
After Trump and Kim met in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas in June that year, the United States and North Korea held a working-level meeting in Stockholm in October 2019 but failed to make progress.
Kim Yo Jong stressed that North Korea's nuclear capabilities and the geopolitical environment have radically changed since the time of the meetings.
North Korea signed a bilateral defense cooperation pact with Russia in June last year that includes a provision committing them to mutual assistance if either nation comes under attack.
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