Donald Trump’s claim that he received a positive letter from Kim Jong Un is false, Pyongyang has said, urging the US president to refrain from using his relations with the North Korean leader for “selfish purposes.”
During his briefing on Saturday, Trump boasted that he had “recently” received a written message from Kim. “It was a nice note. I think we’re doing fine,” he said, insisting that the US and North Korea would’ve been at war by now, were it not for his diplomatic efforts.
But it turned out that the letter wasn’t nice, nor was it unpleasant – as, according to the North Korean Foreign Ministry, it simply didn’t exist.
“There was no letter addressed recently to the US president by the supreme leadership of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea),” the ministry said through Pyongyang’s KCNA news agency.
The diplomats promised they will try to figure out what Trump was looking to gain from “feeding the ungrounded story into the media.”
Relations between the two leaders “are not an issue to be taken up just for diversion, nor should [they] be misused for meeting selfish purposes,” the ministry pointed out.
The love-hate relationship between Trump and Kim started in summer 2018 after they held a sensational summit in Singapore. But despite staging two more meetings and exchanging several letters, the announced goal of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remains as distant as ever.
Discussions on the issue between Pyongyang and Washington have essentially been stalled since early 2019, when Trump rejected Kim’s call for the relief of sanctions against his country.
Trump last sent a letter to the North Korean leader in late March, offering assistance in fighting Covid-19. Back then, Pyongyang made no secret of the fact they had received a message from the White House, with KCNA saying that the US leader was writing about how “impressed” he was with the way Kim had handled the pandemic.
North Korea has so far reported no confirmed coronavirus cases. But US General Robert Abrams, who heads the US forces in South Korea, said that their intelligence suggested it was “an impossible claim” by Pyongyang. However, the commander couldn’t say exactly how many Covid-19 patients there were in North Korea.
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