N. Korea's leader may visit Russia next month: sources

SEOUL, Aug. 11 (Yonhap) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is likely to visit Russia's Far East next month and meet Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, multiple diplomatic sources in Seoul said Thursday.
A ground-breaking ceremony to build a natural gas pipeline linking Sakhalin with Vladivostok will be held next month in the Russian port city, not far from the border with North Korea, and Putin is expected to attend the ceremony, the sources said.
"There is a possibility that Kim could visit Vladivostok and meet Putin on the occasion of the ceremony," one of the sources said on the condition of anonymity.
In late June, North Korea and Russia had apparently arranged a meeting between Kim and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Vladivostok, but the two sides apparently canceled the meeting.
In a bilateral meeting in Moscow this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told his South Korean counterpart Kim Sung-hwan that the North Korean leader has been invited to visit Moscow "long ago" but the scheduling still needed to be coordinated.
Russia is one of the six nations involved in the long-stalled talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program.
Hopes for the resumption of the six-party talks, also including the two Koreas, the U.S., China and Japan, rose last month after top nuclear envoys from the two Koreas held a surprise meeting in Indonesia and agreed to make a joint effort to resume the multilateral process.
Following the inter-Korean meeting, North Korean and U.S. officials met in New York for "exploratory" discussions as part of diplomatic efforts to reopen the six-party talks.
The North's Kim last traveled to Russia in August 2002, when he met then-President Putin in Vladivostok.
kdh@yna.co.kr