OREANDA-NEWS. Yonhap news agency reported with reference to US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun, that Washington will not stop working on agreements on nuclear disarmament with Pyongyang.

“Obviously, we have not made as much progress as we would have hoped at this point, but let me be absolutely clear: we have not given up and we will not give up on what we’re doing,” Biegun said at a reception organized by the Korean Foundation in Washington.

This statement was made a few hours after North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Ri Thae-song warned that the United States would receive a “Christmas gift.” Yonhap considers it to be a threat of resumption of testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, if the US does not show flexibility in negotiations before the end of the year. Ri Thae-song said that North Korea does not believe in American rhetoric in trying to establish dialogue with Pyongyang. According to him, the United States uses negotiations in its political interests.

In June, the leaders of the two countries for the first time after the failed February summit (that meeting ended ahead of time, and the parties later accused each other of making unacceptable demands) met in a demilitarized zone. The meeting lasted only a few minutes, and Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump agreed to create a working group to resolve the deadlock in the negotiations. At the beginning of October, preliminary talks between the American and North Korean delegations took place in Stockholm.

In November, the North Korean Foreign Ministry announced that Kim Jong-un would not meet with Trump till “complete and irreversible cancellation of the hostile policy regarding North Korea.”