North Korea\u2019s foreign minister met with his Swedish counterpart after making a surprise trip to Stockholm that has fuelled speculation about a meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.<\/p>\n
Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho landed at Stockholm Arlanda Airport yesterday on a direct flight from Beijing and spent several hours at the Swedish Foreign Ministry before returning to the North Korean Embassy.<\/p>\n
Ri\u2019s talks with Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom are expected to resume on Friday.<\/p>\n
Sweden has had diplomatic relations with North Korea since 1973 and is one of the few Western countries with an embassy in Pyongyang. It provides consular services for the United States in North Korea.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the key actors want Sweden to play a role, facilitate (talks), be a forum or a link or whatever it may be, then we are prepared to do that,\u201d Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told Sweden\u2019s TT news agency yesterday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be naive and believe it is Sweden that solves these problems,\u201d Lofven added.<\/p>\n
Sweden\u2019s foreign ministry said the talks between Wallstrom and Ri \u201cwill focus on Sweden\u2019s consular responsibilities as a protecting power for the United States, Canada and Australia,\u201d but also will address the security situation on the Korean Peninsula.<\/p>\n
The ministry referred to the UN Security Council\u2019s condemnation of North Korea\u2019s nuclear weapons and missile programs, saying the UN \u201cemphasized the need for intensified diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.\u201d The Swedish ministry said a statement summarizing the talks will be made available today.<\/p>\n
Ri, a former diplomat in Stockholm and London and an ex-nuclear envoy with experience negotiating with rivals South Korea and the United States, was tapped as Pyongyang\u2019s foreign minister in 2016.<\/p>\n
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month, he urged the United Nations not to remain silent about what he called \u201cthe US dangerous game of aggravating (the) situation in and around the Korean peninsula and driving the whole world into a possible disaster of nuclear war.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trip by Ri is being closely watched because there remains a huge amount of preparation that needs to be done and relatively little time before Kim is supposedly planning to sit down for summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Trump.<\/p>\n
Trump has agreed to meet Kim by May. So far, North Korea has yet to publicly comment on what it hopes to gain from the summits, adding an extra element of mystery and skepticism.<\/p>\n
Sweden has been rumoured as a possible site for the summit between Kim and Trump, though a truce village on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas is seen as more likely.<\/p>\n
Senior South Korean officials who travelled to Pyongyang earlier this month and met with Kim say he is willing to discuss the North\u2019s nuclear weapons program.<\/p>\n
It could suggest a potential breakthrough, or a fallback to the North\u2019s longstanding position that it\u2019s willing to get rid of its nuclear weapons if the United States guarantees its safety.<\/p>\n
In the past, that has meant Washington would have to withdraw all of its troops from South Korea, a condition no U.S. president has been willing to consider.<\/p>\n
Niklas Swanstrom of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy said the meeting between the two foreign ministers would only be preliminary to higher-level talks but they could give an indication of North Korea\u2019s interests and demands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North Korea\u2019s foreign minister met with his Swedish counterpart after making a surprise trip to Stockholm that has fuelled speculation about a meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho landed at Stockholm Arlanda Airport yesterday on a direct flight from Beijing and spent several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25019,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25020,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25018\/revisions\/25020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}