Putin, Kim to meet in Russia's Far East for Thursday summit

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a much-anticipated summit Thursday, the Kremlin said, ending weeks of speculation about the meeting's timing and venue.

Preparations for the meeting in Vladivostok, a Russia city on the Pacific, were held in secrecy because of North Korean security concerns, Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said Tuesday.

Ushakov said the talks would focus on the standoff over the North's nuclear program, noting Russia will seek to "consolidate the positive trends" stemming from U.S. President Donald Trump's meetings with Kim.

Kim had two summits with Trump, but the latest in Vietnam in February collapsed because North Korea wanted more sanctions relief than Washington was willing to give for the amount of nuclear disarmament offered by Pyongyang.

Putin's adviser added the Kremlin would try to help "create preconditions and a favorable atmosphere for reaching solid agreements on the problem of the Korean Peninsula," Ushakov said.

Ushakov pointed at a Russia-China roadmap offering a step-by-step approach to solving the nuclear standoff and calling for sanctions relief and security guarantees to Pyongyang. He noted the North's moratorium on nuclear tests and scaling down of U.S.-South Korean military drills helped reduce tensions and created conditions for further progress.

Ushakov said Putin-Kim summit's agenda will also include bilateral cooperation. He added Russia's trade with North Korea is minuscule at just $34 million last year, mostly because of the international sanctions against Pyongyang.

Russia would like to gain broader access to North Korea's mineral resources, including rare metals. Pyongyang, for its part, covets Russia's electricity supplies and wants to attract Russian investment to modernize its dilapidated Soviet-built industrial plants, railways and other infrastructure.

In the meantime, Vladivostok has been seeing a number of unusually strict security measures. Maritime authorities said Tuesday the waters around Russky Island, off the southern tip of Vladivostok, would be closed to all maritime traffic between this morning and Friday morning.

The island, which is home to a university with a conference hall, is seen as a likely summit venue.

Separately, local media reported some platforms at Vladivostok's main train station would be closed for several days, and buses will be rerouted from the train station today.

News website Vl.ru reported municipal authorities undertook road works to make the entryway in and out of the train station less steep -- presumably to allow Kim's limousine to drive straight out from the platform.

Kim, like his father, avoids air travel and is likely to travel by train to Vladivostok, about 419 miles north of Pyongyang.

Earlier on Tuesday, North Korea confirmed the meeting in a terse, two-sentence statement.

North Korea has so far not gotten what it wants most from the recent flurry of high-level summitry between Kim and various world leaders -- namely, relief from crushing international sanctions. There are fears a recent North Korean weapon test and a series of jibes at Washington over deadlocked nuclear negotiations mean Pyongyang may again return to the nuclear and long-range missile tests prompting many in Asia to fear war in 2017.

North Korea announced last week it had tested what it called a new type of "tactical guided weapon." While unlikely to be a prohibited test of a medium- or long-range ballistic missile scuttling the negotiations, the announcement signaled the North's growing disappointment with the diplomatic breakdown.