North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho will begin a rare two-day visit on Thursday to Sweden, which represents the United States diplomatically in the isolated country, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said. Ri will hold talks with his Swedish counterpart Margot Wallstrom on the security situation on the Korean peninsula and Sweden’s representation of the United States, which has no embassy in North Korea, the ministry said.
In its statement, it noted that the U.N. Security Council had unanimously condemned North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs and demanded the “complete, verifiable and irrevocable elimination of these programs”.
“Sweden fully supports the Security Council resolutions. The aim of the visit is to contribute to the effective implementation of the resolutions,” the ministry said.
Since Trump’s surprise announcement last week that he was willing to meet North Korea’s Kim, speculation has mounted over what location might be chosen to host what would be the first-ever meeting between serving leaders of the two countries.
Kim has yet to publicly confirm his readiness to meet Trump.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency reports that Minister for Foreign Affairs Ri is accompanied by Choe Kang II – deputy director general of the North American bureau of North Korea’s foreign ministry – while transferring in China ahead of his flight to Stockholm.
"We can't rule out the possibility of a contact between the North and the US" during Ri's trip to Sweden, Yonhap quotes a Beijing source as saying.
Swedish PM Stefan Löfven last week said the Nordic nation was ready and willing to host an historic meeting between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un.
"If we can help in any way, we will do it," he noted, adding that "the fact that we are a protecting power for the US, have been at the border since the 1950s, and have had an embassy in Pyongyang since the start of the 1970s has given us a special relationship with North Korea in which we feel they trust us".
Löfven's comments came only a few days after he met President Trump at the White House and offered to be a "channel" in improving US-North Korea relations. Trump meanwhile said it was thanks to Swedish negotiations that American student Otto Warmbier was released from North Korea last year, where he was being held in prison.
