| Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un walk together during their meeting in Vladivostok, Russia, April 25. AP-Yonhap |
By Kim Yoo-chul
South Korea and Russia may push for a summit between President Moon Jae-in and Russian President Vladimir Putin for discussions on the North Korea nuclear issue, a presidential aide said, Thursday.
Moon met with Russian security chief Nikolai Patrushev at Cheong Wa Dae, a few hours after Putin had a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vladivostok. The presidential aide said Moon and Patrushev “held wide and in-depth discussions and exchanged opinions on issues concerning the Korean Peninsula.”
Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, is also viewed as one of the Russian leaders' top confidants, said Cheong Wa Dae officials. The Moon-Patrushev meeting is the first of such since September 2017, when they met to finalize the key agenda ahead of Moon's summit with Putin in Vladivostok.
Cheong Wa Dae didn't provide more details about Patrushev's visit to the presidential office. However, one presidential aide told The Korea Times that President Moon and the Russian security chief discussed ideas about a potential summit between Moon and Putin.
“During the meeting, Patrushev told President Moon about key issues discussed at the Putin-Kim summit and Russia's possible role in supporting North Korea's denuclearization because Russia expressed its interest in being actively involved in the process,” the presidential aide said.
A day before the North Korea-Russia summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov signaled the summit agenda would include denuclearization and that Moscow may raise the possibility of a return to the six-party talks that include the Koreas, the United States, China and Japan.
Putin reportedly told the North Korean leader Kim at the start of the summit that?Moscow supported his efforts to normalize North Korea's relations with the United States, adding that he hoped the summit would help clarify Russia's potential role in reviving the nuclear dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.
“Japan might well jump at Putin's apparent suggestion to restart the six party-talks as Tokyo is so desperate for any interaction at all with Pyongyang. Japan passing as it were,” Sean King, an East Asian expert at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, said in an email.
Moon, who is desperate for lasting peace with the North, has directed his administration to get Pyongyang and Washington back to the negotiating table. U.S. President Donald Trump recently signaled his openness to offer limited sanctions relief to the North depending on progress at his in-person meeting with the South Korean leader in Washington, D.C.
Trump and the North Korean leader Kim left Hanoi, Vietnam, after failing to narrow “the definition of denuclearization” or bridge the gap between Pyongyang's hope for concessions from punishing economic sanctions and U.S. demands for verifiable and complete denuclearization.
Russia, a permanent United Nations Security Council member along with China, France, the U.K. and the U.S., is said to have offered a “secret proposal” to North Korea last year under which Moscow may build a nuclear power plant in return for the dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear warheads.
Under the proposal Russia will operate the nuclear plant and transfer all byproducts and waste back to Russia so that the North will not be able to exploit the plant to build nuclear weapons, according to political analysts in Seoul. The presidential aides declined to confirm the proposal made to the North.
“In view of Trump's interest in a nuclear accord with Kim Jong-un as well as his interest in improving relations with Putin, it is possible that Trump will overrule his war cabinet and see the advantage of making Russia a stakeholder in disarmament in East Asia,” said Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy at Johns Hopkins University.