North Korea on Tuesday asked the US to accept its status as a nuclear weapons state before any new summit with President Donald Trump, state news agency KCNA reported.
In a statement, Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's sister and vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, said North Korea's nuclear status is now “irreversible."
"The recognition of the irreversible position of the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) as a nuclear weapons state and the hard fact that its capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed should be a prerequisite for predicting and thinking about everything in the future," Kim said.
"No one can deny the reality and should not misunderstand."
Responding to recent White House remarks expressing openness to renewed dialogue, Kim dismissed such comments as a "unilateral assessment" of the past and warned that 2025 is "neither 2018 nor 2019."
Her statement refers to the three unprecedented summits held between Trump and Kim Jong Un, in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Korean Demilitarised Zone in 2019.
Trump in 2019 became the first sitting US president to set foot on North Korean territory.
As part of a series of negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, he met Kim in the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea.
Kim acknowledged that personal ties between the North Korean leader and Trump were “not bad,” but warned that such relationships are meaningless if the US continues to pursue denuclearisation goals without adapting to geopolitical changes.
"If the US fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-US meeting will remain a ‘hope’ of the US side," she said.
