U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that “things are going very well” after talking with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in about an upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“Just had a long and very good talk with President Moon of South Korea. Things are going very well, time and location of meeting with North Korea is being set,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Also spoke to Prime Minister (Shinzo) Abe of Japan to inform him of the ongoing negotiations.”
Mr. Moon met with Mr. Kim in a historic summit, agreeing on Friday to pursue a permanent peace and the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.
An armistice brought the fighting on the Korean peninsula to an end in 1953, but 65 years later, a final peace agreement has still not been reached.
The Moon-Kim meeting has raised expectations for Mr. Trump's summit with the North Korean leader, the date and location of which have not been finalised. Mr. Trump has demanded that the North give up its weapons, and Washington is pressing for it to do so in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way. Pyongyang is demanding as yet unspecified security guarantees to discuss its arsenal.
Meanwhile, North Korea hailed the summit as a “historic meeting” that paved the way for the start of a new era. The official KCNA news agency carried the text of the leaders’ Panmunjom Declaration and said the encounter opened the way “for national reconciliation and unity, peace and prosperity”. In the document, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon “confirmed the common goal of realising, through complete denuclearisation, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula”.
