North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Saturday invited the South’s President Moon Jae-in for a summit in Pyongyang, Seoul said.
The invitation, delivered by Kim’s visiting sister Kim Yo Jong, said Kim was willing to meet the South’s leader “at the earliest date possible”, said a spokesman for the presidential Blue House.
Moon met Kim Yo Jong — a close confidante of her brother and the first member of the dynasty to set foot in the South since the Korean War — and the North’s ceremonial head of state Kim Yong Nam at the Blue House in Seoul.
“We hope to see you in Pyongyang at an early date,” Kim Yo Jong told Moon after delivering a personal letter from her brother, according to officials.
“We want to see President Moon become a protagonist in opening a new chapter for reunification and leave great footprints in history,” she said.
An inter-Korean summit would be the third of its kind, after Kim’s father and predecessor Kim Jong Il met the South’s Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun in 2000 and 2007 respectively, both of them in Pyongyang.
Moon did not immediately accept the invitation. But the prospect could sow division between the dovish leader, who has long argued for engagement with the nuclear-armed North to bring it to the negotiating table, and US President Donald Trump, who last year traded personal insults and threats of war with Kim.
Washington insists that Pyongyang — which is under multiple sets of UN Security Council sanctions — must take concrete steps towards denuclearisation before any negotiations can happen. And it has warned Seoul against falling for Pyongyang’s Olympic charm offensive.
After months of silence on whether it would even take part in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in the South, the Games have driven a rapprochement on the peninsula, while the North’s athletes, performers and delegates have dominated the headlines.