The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Friday she doesn’t expect her brother to meet President Trump this year, saying there’s no reason for the North to gift Trump high-profile meetings when it’s not being substantially rewarded in return. "But also, you never know,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released through Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency, where she called for major concessions from Washington to keep alive the nuclear diplomacy. “That’s because a surprise thing may still happen, depending upon the judgement and decision between the two top leaders," Kim Yo Jong said. She added that if there is a need for summit talks, it is a US need, while for North Korea, it is “unpractical and does not serve us at all.”
Trump and Kim Jong Un have met three times since embarking on high-stakes nuclear diplomacy in 2018. But negotiations have faltered since their second summit in February 2019, when the Americans rejected North Korean demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capability. Kim Yo Jong said that the diplomacy could be salvaged only by a reciprocal exchange of "irreversible simultaneous major steps," the AP reports. "We would like to make it clear that it does not necessarily mean the denuclearization is not possible. But what we mean is that it is not possible at this point of time," she said. Some analysts believe North Korea will avoid serious talks for now and seek to return to negotiations after the US election in November.
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