The Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Pham Binh Minh, today ended his trip to Pyongyang, where he discussed details of the US summit. and North Korea, which will host Hanoi this month, and which is believed to have dealt with a possible previous visit by the North Korean leader to his country.
The foreign minister thus ended a three-day trip to Pyongyang, where he met with his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, and with the head of international affairs of the Workers Party, Ri Su-yong, confirmed the North Korean state agency KCNA.
Among the officials who accompanied Pham were the chief of protocol of the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, Mai Phuoc Dung, and the foreign spokesperson, Le Thi Thu Hang.
The two sides “exchanged their views on regional and international issues of common interest and analyzed ways to expand their bilateral relations,” KCNA explained briefly without specifying the content of the discussions or anything about the possible state visit of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
The regime of North Korea is extremely strict of the security of its elites, so the opacity is habitual in relation to plans and itineraries.
The Vietnamese and North Korean foreign ministers met in Pyongyang two weeks before the summit between Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump, to be held in Hanoi between February 27th and 28th.
It is hoped that this new meeting in the Vietnamese capital will unblock the dialogue on the denuclearization of the North Korean regime, which has barely shown progress since the first summit that Trump and Kim held in Singapore in June last year.
Taking advantage of this second summit, the North Korean leader could make a state visit to Vietnam.
Despite bilateral historical ties, this would be the first trip of a North Korean leader to the Indochinese country since the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, at the end of the war between communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam.
