Senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol seen with Kim Jong Un

A senior North Korean official who had been reported as purged over the failed nuclear summit with Washington was shown in state media on Monday enjoying a concert near leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korean publications on Monday showed Kim Yong Chol sitting five seats away from a clapping Kim Jong Un in the same row along with other top officials during a musical performance by the wives of Korean People’s Army officers.

Kim Yong Chol has been North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator and the counterpart of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo since Kim Jong Un entered nuclear talks with the U.S. early last year. He traveled to Washington and met President Donald Trump twice before Kim’s two summits with Trump.

Asked on Sunday about the last U.S. contact with Kim Yong Chol and North Korea in general, Pompeo declined to answer, saying, “We conduct our negotiations in private.”

As Kim Jong Un’s point man for the nuclear talks, Kim Yong Chol was stripped of a key party post in apparent censure for the summit’s collapse, a South Korean lawmaker said in April.

That move may have cleared the way for long-time diplomats sidelined during last year’s process to take centrestage if talks with the United States resumed, analysts said.

In April, an official photograph from a session of North Korea’s rubber-stamp legislature showed Kim Yong Chol standing behind Kim Jong Un, but he did not accompany Kim on his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin later that month.

“Kim Yong Chol appears to have been pushed back from power since the Hanoi summit,” said Shin Beom-chul, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

“But exactly how much is something we’re not able to figure out.”

Some officials who worked with Kim Yong Chol have been out of the public eye since the summit. But other seasoned diplomats who appeared to have been sidelined, including Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, were seen returning to the spotlight.