South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Friday that his US counterpart Donald Trump "clearly" wants to maintain dialogue with Pyongyang and that he was "urging" him to do so.
Lee told reporters at the presidential Blue House that South Korea was continuing "preliminary coordination efforts" to facilitate talks between the North and the US, adding that a meeting "remains difficult" but was "not impossible."
"I cannot say for certain how likely it is, but it is also clear that we must make every possible effort to turn that possibility into reality," he said.
Trump announced in August that he intended to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un later this year as he once again touted the pair's relationship, although he gave no further details on the plan - which would be their first meeting since Trump's first term in the White House.
"You know what, the fact that I get along with him, that's a good thing not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen," Trump said at the time.
North Korea, which has reestablished increasingly close ties with Russia in recent years, has offered little response to Trump's comments.
Iran
Lee also told the media that South Korea would not deploy troops to the Middle East in a way that could involve the country in conflict.
"There will be no involvement or intervention in the war. We will not deploy troops or military assets in that manner," he said, adding that South Korea would "carry out the minimum necessary activities" to defend its merchant ships and oil shipping routes in the region.
Seoul had reportedly been weighing deploying troops to the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway and crucial oil and gas transit chokepoint that has been at the centre of tensions between Washington and Tehran since the Iran war broke out in late February.
It comes after Trump in August announced that he had ordered US forces to scale back "costly" joint military drills with South Korea, which he said sent an "inappropriate and hostile" signal to Pyongyang.
"While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, 'No thanks!'" Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social of his decision.
Kim's sister slams US drills
Hopes for an imminent meeting may have been doused slightly after Kim's powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, hit out at the US over recent military drills in the Western Pacific, which she labelled a "US-led war rehearsal."
"The present situation, in which new records are set in terms of practical action hostile toward the DPRK, stresses the need to break records in our responsive action, proportional or more offensive in its nature," Kim Yo Jong said in a statement shared by North Korea's KCNA state news agency on Friday.
She added: "Our will to defend our sovereignty will be expressed in clearer action and there will be never ever change in the course of intensifying the nuclear war deterrence."
The US, South Korea and Japan wrapped up Exercise Freedom Edge 26, which US Pacific Command said advanced "trilateral readiness across the Indo-Pacific," on 11 September.
