MOSCOW, November 8. /TASS/. Multilateral initiatives are needed to settle the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said on Friday.
According to the senior Russian diplomat, it is necessary to develop such initiatives "that would outline areas of practical work in the multilateral format." "This format will make it possible to avoid a situation when any of the sides is to take the most difficult first step," he said at the 4th Moscow Nonproliferation Conference.
"The reasons why the parties to the talks [North Korea and the US] begin to feel disappointment over the lack of progress are clear, since the period of establishing first contacts and agreeing the framework statement should naturally be followed by the next period when the negotiators begin to translate their words into deeds," he said. "Regrettably, we see nothing of the kind so far. First of all, I think, the negotiators cannot agree what their reciprocal first practical steps are to be."
The United States and North Korea held working talks on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in Sweden on October 5. The meeting however yielded no results. The parties differed in their assessments of the contact. Whereas Kim Myong-Gil, who led the North Korean delegation, said the talks had been a failure, the US Department of States described these consultations as constructive. Apart from that, the US delegation accepted Sweden’s invitation to come back to Stockholm in a two-week period to continue talks with North Korea.