President Moon Jae-in embarks on an eight-day trip to three Central Asian nations in the coming hours.
His focus will be on shoring up economic ties with the countries and winning their backing for his efforts to denuclearize North Korea.
Shin Se-min reports.
President Moon Jae-in will be on the road for more than a week visiting Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
He hopes to improve relations on the economic and political fronts,… while earning support for his administration's peace drive on the Korean Peninsula.
"The three Central Asian nations the president will tour are some of the major partners of the administration's New Northern Policy drive."
For three days from Tuesday,… the president will be in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat,… where he will sit down with President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov for talks on strengthening strategic partnerships, including making it easier for South Korean firms to make inroads into the country.
He will also tour a three billion U.S. dollar petrochemical plant site in Kiyanly that was built by a global consortium led by Korea's Hyundai Engineering Company.
President Moon continues on to Uzbekistan on Thursday for a four-day stay.
The South Korean leader will hold a summit with the president there and address parliamentarians in a bid to improve bilateral ties in fields such as the medical and tech industries.
The last stop of President Moon's three-nation trip ends in Kazakhstan.
The South Korean leader will hold a summit with his newly-inaugurated counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as well as the country's first president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
They are expected to talk about the so-called "Kazakh model" of denuclearization - something that allowed the country to accumulate wealth in return for ditching its nuclear weapons.
It's also a model U.S. President Donald Trump pitched to North Korea for its own denuclearization.
President Moon will also attend a repatriation ceremony for the remains of the two Korean independence fighters who were buried in Kazakhstan.
He will also push to bring home the remains of General Hong Bum-do , a fighter who stood against Japan's colonial rule of Korea in the early 1900s.
"On his first trip to the region, the President hopes to help strengthen friendly relationships with the three countries... and lay the groundwork for future partnerships under the New Northern Policy initiative.
Shin Se-min, Arirang News."