North Korean leader Kim Jong Un invited on Saturday South Korean President Moon Jae-in to visit Pyongyang “at an early date,” announced a spokesman for the Blue House.
Moon had said “let’s create conditions to make it happen”, the official said, an indication that he was likely to accept the invitation.
Moon did not immediately accept the offer, calling instead for efforts to "create the right conditions to realize" such a visit and urging Pyongyang to actively seek dialogue with the US, he added.
"It is absolutely necessary for the North and the United States to engage in talks at an early date," he cited Moon as saying.
An inter-Korean summit would be the third of its kind, after Kim's father and predecessor Kim Jong Il met the South's Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun in 2000 and 2007 respectively, both of them in Pyongyang.
Any meeting would represent a diplomatic coup for Moon, who swept to power last year on a policy of engaging more with the reclusive North.
The recent detente, anchored by South Korea’s hosting of the Winter Olympic Games, came despite an acceleration in the North’s weapons program last year and pressure from Seoul’s allies in Washington.
The invitation came during talks and a lunch Moon hosted with Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of the North Korean leader, at the presidential Blue House in Seoul.
Kim Yo Jong arrived in South Korea on Friday with Kim Yong Nam, the North’s nominal head of state, for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in the alpine resort town of Pyeongchang. They shook hands with Moon and cheered for athletes from the two countries who marched under a unified peninsula flag for the first time in a decade.
Some North Korean experts believe tough UN sanctions that are cutting off most of the isolated North’s sources of revenue have added pressure on Pyongyang to engage further with Seoul.
“I think this overture towards South Korea is partly sanctions-related, and also related to the fact that it’s clear a divergence has developed between Washington and Seoul’s most keenly desired goals in the near term,” said Andray Abrahamian, a research fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS in Hawaii.
“The North Koreans should understand that for a summit or any kind of serious talks to occur, Moon needs to be able to take something to Washington - something that addresses denuclearization,” he said before the North’s invitation to Moon was announced.
Moon’s desire to engage North Korea was in contrast to his US ally.
US Vice President Mike Pence also attended the Games opening ceremony but had no contact with the North Korean delegation.
North and South Korea are technically still at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. The United States fought with South Korea and maintains tens of thousands of troops and an “ironclad” agreement to protect its ally.
North Korea has spent years developing its military, saying it needs to protect itself from US aggression.
The two Koreas have a rocky and sometimes violent history at the Blue House. In January 1968, Kim Yo Jong’s grandfather, founding North Korean president Kim Il Sung, sent a squad of North Korean commandos to Seoul who tried unsuccessfully to kill then-president Park Chung-hee.
Kim Yo Jong, 28, is the first member of the ruling Kim family bearing the bloodline of the sacred Mount Paektu, a centerpiece of the North’s idolization and propaganda campaign, to cross the border into the South since the 1950-53 Korean War.
She has rapidly risen up the ladder since her brother inherited power from their father, and is now among his closest confidantes.
The delegations shared a lunch of dried pollack dumpling soup, a regional specialty of the only divided province on the Korean peninsula.
The North's official media have reflected the positive tone, with the ruling party's mouthpiece Rodong Sinmun carrying seven pictures of the delegation's departure from Pyongyang and arrival in Incheon on its front page Saturday.
On page two it printed seven more of the opening ceremony and its representatives' meetings and handshakes with Moon, whom it described as president.
It is rare for the North's official media to refer to the South's leader as president, usually describing them as chief executive or similar, and even more unusual for a picture of them to be shown.
Moon and Kim Yong Nam planned to return to the Games venue to watch the joint Korean women’s ice hockey team - the first ever combined team at the Olympics - take on Switzerland, the Blue House said.
