Photo: IC

 
The US State Department on Saturday said that its delegation had "good discussions" with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) counterparts at the latest working-level talks held in the Swedish capital of Stockholm.

It expects to return to talks in two weeks, despite that Pyongyang said the talks broke down due to Washington's inflexibility.

The US delegation, which was led by Stephen Biegun, US special representative for the DPRK affairs, "had good discussions with its DPRK counterparts" in Stockholm on Saturday and has accepted an invitation from Sweden to "return to Stockholm to meet again with its DPRK counterparts in two weeks time, in order to continue discussions on all of the topics," said department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus in a statement.

Ortagus made the remarks hours after the DPRK delegation's chief negotiator Kim Myong Gil, following the eight and a half hours of talks with the US side, told reporters that the working-level talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula broke down.

Speaking outside the DPRK embassy in Stockholm, Kim said that negotiations broke down "entirely because the US has not discarded its old stance and attitude" and came to a negotiating table with an "empty hand."

Ortagus, contradicting Kim's remarks, said in the statement that the comments from the DPRK delegation "do not reflect the content or the spirit of today's 8 1/2 hour discussion."

Ortagus said that the United States "brought creative ideas and had good discussions with its DPRK counterparts."

It is unknown if Pyongyang has also agreed to meet again with the US delegation in Stockholm in the following weeks.

The Korean Peninsular denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington have hit a stalemate since the second summit between top DPRK leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in late February ended without any agreement. The two leaders first met in Singapore in June 2018.

In an impromptu meeting in late June at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom, Trump and Kim agreed to restart working-level talks.