Russia’s top diplomat says the United States has asked for advice ahead of President Trump’s summit this week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that Russia believes the United States must offer Kim “security guarantees” for any agreement on North Korea ridding its nuclear weapons to succeed, according to the Associated Press.
“The U.S. is even asking our advice, our views on this or that scenario of” how the summit could go, Lavrov said.
Trump leaves Washington on Monday to travel to Vietnam for his second summit with Kim. The two are scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Hanoi.
Lavrov is also visiting Vietnam this week.
A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that special envoy for North Korea Mark Lambert met with deputy foreign minister Igor Morgulov and ambassador at large Oleg Burmistrov in Moscow on February 11 “to discuss efforts to achieve the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea.”
“The conversation was candid and constructive,” the spokesperson said. “During the meetings, Special Envoy Lambert shared with his counterparts the United States’ continued commitment to making progress on the transformation of U.S.-DPRK relations and the establishment of a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, in parallel with progress on complete denuclearization.”
Trump told governors at the White House that he expects “we’ll have a very tremendous summit.”
“We want denuclearization, and I think he’ll have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of an economy,” he said Monday.
Kim, however, has given little indication that he plans to denuclearize. The Trump administration admitted last week that the two countries still don’t have a “shared understanding of what ‘denuclearization’ is,” despite the fact the agreement Trump and Kim signed in Singapore eight months ago uses the term repeatedly.
