President Donald Trump would welcome communications with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after having had friendly relations with Kim during his first term, the White House said on Wednesday.
"The president remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
She was responding to a report by Seoul-based NK News, a website that monitors North Korea, that the North's delegation at the United Nations in New York had repeatedly refused to accept a letter from Trump to Kim.
Trump and Kim held three summits during Trump's 2017-2021 first term and exchanged a number of what Trump called "beautiful" letters. In June 2019, Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone with South Korea.
Little progress was made, however, at reining in North Korea's nuclear program, and Trump acknowledged in March that Pyongyang is a "nuclear power."
Since Trump's first-term summitry with Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.
The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of a new president, Lee Jae-myung, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.
As a gesture of engagement on Wednesday Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along their shared border.
Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Lee and Trump than it was in the U.S. president's first term.
Since then North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, and developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow's war in Ukraine, to which Pyongyang has provided both troops and weaponry.
Kim said in a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported on Thursday.
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