SEOUL: The powerful sister of North Korea’s leader warned the United States on Tuesday against pursuing denuclearization, after a White House official was quoted as saying President Donald Trump was open to dialogue with Kim Jong Un.
“Any attempt to deny the position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state... will be thoroughly rejected,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by state media, referring to the North by the acronym for its official name.
Kim said the “personal relationship” between her brother and Trump was “not bad,” but warned that should not be used to “serve the purpose of denuclearization” in any future talks.
Trump and the North Korean leader met three times during the US president’s first term in a bid to reach an agreement on the denuclearization of the North.
But since their second summit in Hanoi in 2019 fell apart over failure to agree on what the North would get in return, Pyongyang has accelerated its nuclear program.
