(COLOMBO, LANKAPUVATH) – President Donald Trump will meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore, the US president announced Thursday on Twitter.
“The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th,” Trump tweeted. “We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!”
The summit, which has been in the works since Trump accepted Kim’s invitation to meet in March, will be the first ever meeting between a sitting US president and North Korean leader.
US officials had also considered holding the summit at the Korean demilitarized zone or in Mongolia, but ultimately settled on the city-state of Singapore as the location.
CNN reported Wednesday Trump administration officials were moving forward with plans for the meeting to take place in Singapore.
Singapore was the early leading choice among top administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House chief of staff John Kelly, who from the beginning recognized that the summit location would play an outsized role in how the talks are viewed around the world.
Their chief concern was the appearance of neutrality — both in the location’s politics (no countries such as China or Russia that are seen as “too communist”) and its geography. Logistics were a secondary but still major concern. Once Kim demonstrated he was willing to get on one of his airplanes to fly to China this week, officials were convinced Singapore — some 3,000 miles from Pyongyang — would work.
Trump last week said a date and time for the meeting had been set. But despite that, a location and date were not finalized until Pompeo met with the North Koreans. Both they and the South Korean government were pressing for talks at the DMZ and were encouraged by Trump’s public endorsement of holding them there.
