Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s top envoy for North Korea will travel to Moscow for meetings this week about the denuclearization process, officials with both sides confirmed Monday.
"We will hold a full round of consultations on the situation on the Korean Peninsula,” Russian deputy foreign minister Igor Morgulov said Monday, according to state-run TASS.
Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea, will stop in Moscow Tuesday before heading west to Paris and Brussels. His trip comes on the heels of a separate summit Morgulov hosted with North Korean and Chinese diplomats, which saw the two Eastern powers back the pariah state’s call for sanctions relief in the midst of negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
“Special Representative Biegun will regularly travel to meet with allies and partners as we work towards the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea,” a State Department official, noting his Paris and Brussels meetings, told the Washington Examiner.
China and Russia, having provided North Korea a series of economic lifelines over the years, called for Western powers to reward the regime for the halting missile tests and other diplomatic gestures in recent months.
“Taking into account the important measures of the DPRK side in the denuclearization issue, the three sides held that it is necessary to consider launching the adjustment of the United Nations Security Council's sanctions against the DPRK in due course,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry, using the formal acronym for the North Korean regime, said after the Oct. 9 meeting in Moscow. “The three sides reiterated their opposition to unilateral sanctions.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pre-empted those suggestions during a Security Council meeting last month.
“We must not forget what’s brought us this far: the historic international pressure campaign that this council has made possible through the sanctions that it imposed,” he said. "Until the final denuclearization of the DPRK is achieved and fully verified, it is our solemn collective responsibility to fully implement all U.N. Security Council resolutions pertaining to North Korea.”