Trump offers to meet North Korea's Kim at DMZ this weekend

(Reuters) U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would like to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this weekend at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the border of North and South Korea.

Trump, who is in Osaka, Japan, for a Group of 20 summit, is due to arrive in South Korea later on Saturday. He is scheduled to leave on Sunday and return to Washington.

“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” Trump said on Twitter.

Trump told reporters on Saturday, “We’ll be there and I just put out a feeler because I don’t know where he is right now. He may not be in North Korea.”

“If he’s there, we’ll see each other for two minutes, that’s all we can, but that will be fine,” he added. Trump said he and Kim “get along very well.”

U.S. special envoy Stephen Biegun said on Friday the United States was ready to hold constructive talks with North Korea to follow through on a denuclearization agreement reached by the two countries last year, South Korea’s foreign ministry said.

Biegun told his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that Washington wanted to make “simultaneous, parallel” progress on the agreement reached at a summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore last year, the ministry said in a statement.

Both sides had agreed to establish new relations and work towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

But negotiations have stalled since a second summit in Vietnam in February collapsed as the two sides failed to narrow differences between U.S. calls for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.

South Korea’s presidential office said nothing was confirmed with regards to a Trump, Kim meeting.

“Nothing is fixed at the moment, and our previous position of hoping for dialogue between North Korea and the United States remains unchanged,” the office said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit that Kim had told him in April security guarantees were key, and that corresponding measures were needed to realize denuclearization, according to South Korea’s presidential office on Saturday.

North Korea’s nominal head of state Choe Ryong Hae said in a speech praising Kim’s achievements on Friday that his “strategic decision and proactive external activities” brought about “the great June 12 event”, or the Singapore summit with Trump, and “re-establish(ed) the relations between the DPRK and big powers”, North Korea’s state media KCNA on Saturday.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is North Korea’s official name.

“The DPRK government will ... work hard to develop the ties of friendship and cooperation with all the countries that respect the DPRK’s sovereignty and are friendly to it,” Choe said, according to KCNA.