IN view of recent provocative acts such as South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has no choice but to suspend high-level talks with South Korea, the official KCNA news agency said yesterday.

    The state media also said the United States should think twice about the fate of the planned DPRK-U.S. summit.

    DPRK First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said in a statement yesterday that the country may reconsider the scheduled U.S.-DPRK summit and the Trump administration must show sincerity in its desire to meet with the DPRK to improve bilateral relations.

    However, if the United States only wants to press the DPRK to abandon its nuclear arsenal, the latter would have to reconsider whether to attend, the KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

    Shortly after the report, the U.S. State Department said it was continuing to prepare for the summit between President Donald Trump and the DPRK’s top leader Kim Jong Un scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.

    The United States has not heard anything directly from Pyongyang or Seoul that would change the arrangements, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told a briefing in Washington.

    The U.S. side needs to verify the KCNA’s report, she said. “We’ve received no formal or even informal notification of anything.”

    “We’ve seen some pretty good indications from them so far,” she said, citing the DPRK’s release of three American detainees last week. “So they have taken some steps in the right direction ... I think those are all good signs.”

    Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said yesterday that facing important opportunities in a political settlement for the peninsula, relevant parties, especially the DPRK and the United States, should work together and show their goodwill and sincerity to create good conditions for the meeting between their leaders.

    The KCNA said that the “2018 Max Thunder” joint air combat exercise, involving over 100 warplanes including “B-52” strategic bombers and “F-22 Raptor” stealth fighters, is aimed at launching pre-emptive strikes against the DPRK as well as taking control of the airspace.

    The report called the drill an act of “playing with fire,” saying that it is a “blatant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula.”

    The report said the north and south had reached an agreement on making joint efforts to defuse the military tensions on the peninsula and ease the danger of war “and the U.S. also fully supported it.”

    “However, even before the ink of the historic April 27 Declaration had dried, the South Korean authorities and the U.S. started such a drill against the DPRK, reacting to all peace-loving efforts and good intentions which the DPRK has shown with rude and wicked provocation,” the report said.

    The high-level talks planned for yesterday were expected to discuss ways to enforce the Panmunjom Declaration, which was announced April 27, agreeing to complete denuclearization and the alteration of the current armistice agreement to a peace treaty by the end of this year.

    (Xinhua)

    (SD-Agencies)