After G-20 summit, Trump meets Moon in S Korea over dinner

After attending the G-20 summit in Japan, US President Donald Trump on Saturday attended a dinner meeting hosted by his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in at the latter's presidential office here, hours after his arrival in South Korea.

Earlier today, Trump arrived at Osan Air Base in Gyeonggi Province on Air Force One plane and was received by South Korean and US officials including the country's Ambassador to South Korea, Harry Harris, Yonhap News Agency reported.

Trump then boarded a Marine One helicopter which took him to a US military base in Yongsan located in central Seoul.

He continued the rest of the journey by a car to reach the South Korean presidential office or the Cheong Wa Dae, where he was received by Moon.

The two leaders then took a stroll around the office complex and shared cocktail drinks together before holding a dinner meet at Sangchunjae pavilion, a beautiful structure modelled after a traditional Korean house, according to the news report.

The dinner meeting comes ahead of Trump's scheduled visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on Sunday. The DMZ serves as the de facto border between North Korea and South Korea.

In his previous visit in 2017, Trump had planned to visit DMZ along with Moon but was shelved due to poor weather conditions.

During the ongoing visit, Trump is expected to hold a meeting with over a dozen South Korean business leaders at a hotel before holding bilateral talks with Moon. Resuming the stalled denuclearisation talks between the US and North Korea is expected to feature during the negotiations.

Talks between the two countries hit a roadblock after the second summit in Vietnam ended abruptly with no joint statement being released. The two sides reportedly failed to resolve their differences over sanction waiver.

North Korea tested multiple short-range missiles last month as a sign of apparent frustration over the stalled negotiations and continuing sanctions.

Pyongyang has repeatedly insisted that the removal of sanctions will help spur economic growth, while Washington has reaffirmed that sanctions will not be removed till the communist country completely stopped its nuclear weapons programme.

After wrapping up his engagements in Osaka, Trump had expressed his wish to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the DMZ.

"While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!" he tweeted.

A few hours later, North Korea reciprocated Trump's tweet and said that it was a "very interesting suggestion."

"If this is realised, it would serve as another mengful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations," North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui said in a statement carried by KCNA.

However, Choe said that the North Korean government did not receive an official proposal from the US administration.

( With inputs from ANI )