North and South Korea agree to summit on dismantling weapons

Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon of South Korea, center, crossing into North Korea on Monday for a meeting in the truce village of Panmunjom. The two sides agreed their leaders would meet again next month.CreditYonhap, via Associated Press.

SEOUL, South Korea — President Moon Jae-in of South Korea will visit Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, next month to hold his third summit meeting with that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, South Korean officials said Monday.

A joint statement, released on Monday after a meeting of senior officials from North and South Korea, did not specify a date for the visit.

It was unclear whether the North Koreans asked Mr. Moon to visit Pyongyang in time for the country’s annual national day celebration on Sept. 9. This year, North Korea is commemorating the 70th anniversary of its founding as a communist state, and it has been trying to invite foreign dignitaries to the country for the occasion.

Last week, the North’s Foreign Ministry accused Washington of telling other countries not to send high-level delegations to the celebrations in Pyongyang, which could include a large-scale military parade.

No sitting South Korean leader has attended the North Korean anniversary.

Mr. Moon will be the third South Korean president to visit Pyongyang. Two former presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, met with Mr. Kim’s father and predecessor, Kim Jong-il, in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, respectively. Mr. Moon has inherited those leaders’ policies of promoting political reconciliation between the two countries.

Mr. Moon has already met twice with Mr. Kim this year, in April and in May. Both those meetings took place in Panmunjom, a village straddling the highly fortified border. During their April 27 meeting, which was the first time Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon met, they agreed that Mr. Moon would visit Pyongyang in the fall.

South Korean officials have recently suggested the possibility of a third meeting this year, in the hopes of breaking an impasse between North Korea and the United States over the dismantling of the North’s nuclear arms program.

In April, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon reached a broad agreement on easing military tensions and improving their countries’ ties. That meeting, and their second meeting at Panmunjom, which was held on May 26, helped to lay the groundwork for Mr. Kim’s landmark talks with President Trump on June 12 in Singapore, the first time sitting leaders of the United States and North Korea have met.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim signed a joint statement at that meeting in which Mr. Kim committed to work toward “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” while Mr. Trump promised to provide the North with security guarantees and to help build “new” bilateral relations.

But the statement included no specifics on how denuclearization would be achieved, and both sides have since expressed frustration with the other.

Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pyongyang to urge the country to take concrete steps toward denuclearization, including disclosing an inventory of its nuclear weapons and facilities, and dismantling some of them. But North Korea later called the Trump administration’s behavior “gangster-like,” accusing Washington of demanding a “unilateral” denuclearization while offering little in return.

North Korea has recently demanded that South Korea and the United States declare an end to the Korean War, as a prelude to negotiating a formal peace treaty to replace the armistice that halted the fighting 65 years ago. During their April meeting, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon agreed to push for such a declaration by the end of this year.

Pyongyang insists that Washington make the North Koreans feel safe before expecting them to give up their nuclear weapons. It says that by declaring an end to the Korean War, Washington can demonstrate that it is moving away from its hostility toward the North. But American officials have been reluctant to grant such a highly symbolic concession before the North takes more meaningful steps toward denuclearization.

South Korean officials are trying to help the two sides find common ground.