North Korea: ready for open talks with the US, says Russia’s Sergei Lavrov

Pyongyang is open to direct talks with the US regarding their nuclear missiles programme, according to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

Lavrov said that he passed on the message to his counterpart Rex Tillerson, when the two met in Vienna on Thursday.

Though there was no immediate response from Tillerson, the official position of the state department is that Pyongyang would have to show that it is serious about abandoning its nuclear programme, as part of a comprehensive agreement before a dialogue can start.

Lavrov conveyed the apparent offer on the day a top UN official, Jeffrey Feltman, met the North Korean foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, in Pyongyang, during the first high-level UN visit to the country in six years.

Feltman is an American and a former US diplomat, but the state department said that he was not in North Korea with a message from Washington.

“We know that North Korea wants above all to talk to the United States about guarantees for its security. We are ready to support that, we are ready to take part in facilitating such negotiations,” said Lavrov at an international conference in Vienna, according to the Interfax news agency.

“Our American colleagues, [including] Rex Tillerson, have heard this,” he added.

The diplomatic moves come amid an increased sense of urgency to find a way of defusing the tensions over North Korea’s increasingly ambitious nuclear and missile tests. The standoff reached a new peak on 29 November, when North Korea tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-15, capable of reaching Washington, New York and the rest of the continental United States. The missile launch followed the test of what was reportedly a hydrogen bomb in September.