South Korea's Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se will depart for Malaysia on Tuesday to attend a series of ASEAN-related meetings to be held in Kuala Lumpur this week.
The meetings scheduled from Wednesday to Thursday include the ASEAN-plus-three Foreign Ministers' Meeting and the East Asia Summit,... but the attention is centered on the ASEAN Regional Forum.
That's because North Korea's Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong will be in attendance along with his counterparts from the six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing North Korea.
During the ARF meeting on Thursday, Yun and other six-party member nation representatives including Washington's John Kerry, Beijing's Wang Yi, Tokyo's Fumio Kishida and Moscow's Sergey Lavrov are expected to hold talks on ways to handle North Korea's nuclear program.
Seoul's foreign ministry says Yun will urge Pyongyang to engage in nuclear talks, while letting the regime know that South Korea is open to inter-Korean dialogue.