North Korea said nuclear talks with US have broken down

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A motorcade carrying a North Korean delegation heads for Villa Elfvik on the island of Lidingo off Stockholm in Sweden on Saturday. Photo: Reuters

A motorcade carrying a North Korean delegation heads for Villa Elfvik on the island of Lidingo off Stockholm in Sweden on Saturday. Photo: Reuters

Zhang Liangui, a former professor of international strategic research at the Central Party School in Beijing, said Kim’s visits to China were no longer seen as such a surprise given that the North Korean leader had travelled to the country to meet President Xi Jinping five times in the past year or so.

“Kim has made these visits to China to play the Beijing card when dealing with the American president, because he wanted to show that he had Beijing’s support,” Zhang said.

He noted Kim’s choice of Beijing for his first ever foreign state visit in March last year, a trip he took ahead of his first summit with Trump, in Singapore in June.

“But China won’t support everything the North wants, because Beijing and Washington have reached a consensus that a denuclearised Korean peninsula is in their common interest,” Zhang said.

In Sweden, the delegation from North Korea – which is under sanctions banning much of its trade due to its nuclear programme – arrived on Thursday after Pyongyang unexpectedly announced this week that talks would take place on Saturday.

The meeting will be the first formal working-level talks since Trump and Kim met in June and agreed to restart negotiations that stalled after a failed summit in Vietnam in February.

Police had closed off the approaches to the complex facing the Baltic Sea on the island of Lidingo, where the delegations led by US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun and North Korea’s Kim Myong-gil were expected to meet.

Only a day after announcing the resumption of the high-level talks, North Korea claimed it had designed for submarine launch, its latest provocative move.

But Zhang noted that it was a short-range ballistic missile and would not be able to hit the US mainland. “Kim has been very careful about handling diplomatic ties with Washington since his first summit with Trump,” he said.

The Pentagon on Thursday said the missile appeared to have been launched from a “sea-based platform” and not a submarine.

Trump has said he saw no problem with the string of short-range rocket tests that have been conducted by Pyongyang, insisting his personal ties with the North’s leader were still good.

Washington and Pyongyang have remained far apart on denuclearisation since Trump and Kim signed a vaguely worded statement during the Singapore summit last year that committed the North to “work towards the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg and Reuters