Moscow hails Pyongyang offer of talks with Seoul
MOSCOW. June 6 (Interfax) - Moscow hails a North Korean offer on Thursday to resume talks with South Korea on a whole number of issues, including the Kaesong Industrial Region issue, and expects that the proposed talks will lead to the resumption of talks on the North Korean nuclear problem, a senior Russian diplomat said.
The offer was announced by the communist country's National Unification Committee.
Pyongyang proposed "normalizing" the two countries' joint operation of North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Region, suspended about a month ago because of March's new conflict between the two nations, according to Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea also said it was willing to have communication hotlines restored and discuss humanitarian issues such as the problem of reunification of families that got divided during the Korean war of 1950-1953.
"Of course, we believe that all this deserves a positive assessment, especially in light of the recent tension and the threatening statements that came from Pyongyang in abundance. It was and invariably is our premise that negotiations and dialogue are always better than mutual threats and especially than specific acts of war," Ambassador at Large Grigory Logvinov told Interfax.
"We positively assess the fact that a positive response has come from South Korea," he said. Russia expects that "these forward moves will become a stable trend that will eventually build, or help build, conditions for unblocking negotiations to solve the nuclear and other problems of the region as a whole."
Earlier, Seoul had repeatedly come up with offers to resume talks with Pyongyang.