This is a list of international trips made by Kim Jong Un. During his tenure as North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un has made ten foreign trips to five countries. Kim became the supreme leader of North Korea in 2011 and his first international state visit was to China in March 2018.
Kim Jong Un was also educated abroad in a neutral country before becoming North Korean leader.
The number of visits per country where Kim Jong Un traveled are:
| Country | Locations | Date(s) | Leaders met | Details | Image | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 |  Russia | Vostochny Cosmodrome, Eastern Federal University, Komsomolsk aircraft factory, Vladivostok | September 12–17, 2023 | Russian President Vladimir Putin | Second meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Attending the Eastern Economic Forum. |  |
| Country | Locations | Date(s) | Leaders meeting | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 South Korea | Seoul | Cancelled | South Korean President Moon Jae-in | Official visit. During the September 2018 inter-Korean summit, Kim & Moon announced that Kim would visit Seoul by the end of the year. [21] Following the summit's conclusion, it was reported from South Korea's Yonhap news agency that the visit would happen in December 2018. [22] As of March 2019 there are no preparations. [23] Due to Conservative Yoon Suk-yeol winning the 2022 South Korean elections, the potential trip is no longer possible. |
 Mongolia | Ulaanbaatar | Cancelled | Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga | President Khaltmaagiin Battulga sent a letter to Kim Jong Un, congratulating him on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of formal Mongolia–North Korea relations. In the letter, he invited Kim to visit Ulaanbaatar, but this is not possible anymore because Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh won the election in 2021. |
 United States | Washington, D.C. | Cancelled | United States President Donald Trump | Then-United States President Donald Trump expressed interest in inviting Kim to the White House and both he and the Korean Central News Agency claimed that Kim accepted an invitation. [24] [25] [26] [27] Trump said that such a visit would happen “at the appropriate time, a little bit further down the road.” [28] Due to Donald Trump winning presidency in the 2024 presidential election, there is a possibility of this meeting happening in the near future.[ citation needed ] |
North Korea has diplomatic relations with 160 states. The country's foreign relations have been dominated by its conflict with South Korea and its historical ties to the Soviet Union. Both the government of North Korea and the government of South Korea claim to be the sole legitimate government of the whole of Korea. The de facto end of the Korean War left North Korea in a military confrontation with South Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
Relations between North Korea and the United States have been historically hostile. The two countries have no formal diplomatic relations. Instead, they have adopted an indirect diplomatic arrangement using neutral intermediaries. The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang is the U.S. protecting power and provides limited consular services to U.S. citizens. North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), does not have an embassy in Washington, D.C., but is represented in the United States through its mission to the United Nations in New York City which serves as North Korea's de facto embassy.
Kim Jong Un is a North Korean politician who has been the third Supreme Leader of North Korea since December 2011 and general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) since 2012. He is the third son of Kim Jong Il, who was the second supreme leader of North Korea, and a grandson of Kim Il Sung, the founder and first supreme leader of the country.
The Korean Armistice Agreement is an armistice that brought about a cessation of hostilities of the Korean War. It was signed by United States Army Lieutenant General William Harrison Jr. and General Mark W. Clark representing the United Nations Command (UNC), North Korea leader Kim Il Sung and General Nam Il representing the Korean People's Army (KPA), and Peng Dehuai representing the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA). The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, and was designed to "ensure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved."
Ri Sol-ju is the current First Lady of North Korea as the wife of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea–Singapore relations are bilateral relations between North Korea and Singapore.
The 2017–2018 North Korea crisis was a period of heightened tension between North Korea and the United States. The crisis began early in 2017 when North Korea conducted a series of missile and nuclear tests that demonstrated the country's ability to launch ballistic missiles beyond its immediate region, suggesting their nuclear weapons capability was developing at a faster rate than had been assessed by U.S. intelligence. Both countries started exchanging increasingly heated rhetoric, including nuclear threats and personal attacks between the two leaders, which, compounded by a joint U.S.–South Korea military exercise undertaken in August and North Korea's sixth nuclear test in September, raised international tensions in the region and beyond and stoked fears about a possible nuclear conflict between the two nations. In addition, North Korea also threatened Australia twice with nuclear strikes throughout the year for their allegiance with the United States. International relations lecturer and former government strategist Van Jackson said in the book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War that it was the closest the world had come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
2018 in North Korea was marked by attempts by the government to develop its international relationships, particularly in regards to South Korea. In February, North Korean athletes marched alongside their South Korean counterparts under the Korean Unification Flag at the 2018 Seoul Olympic Games. North Korea's Kim Jong-Un met with South Korea's Moon Jae-in three times during the year. Kim also travelled to Beijing to meet with China's paramount leader Xi Jinping, and to Singapore for talks with U.S. President Donald Trump.
The April 2018 inter-Korean summit took place on 27 April 2018 on the South Korean side of the Joint Security Area, between Moon Jae-in, President of South Korea, and Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Supreme Leader of North Korea. The summit was the third inter-Korean summit – the first in eleven years. It was also the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953 that a North Korean leader entered the South's territory; President Moon also briefly crossed into the North's territory.
The 2018 North Korea–United States Singapore Summit, commonly known as the Singapore Summit, was a summit meeting between North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, held at the Capella Hotel, Sentosa, Singapore, on June 12, 2018. It was the first-ever meeting between leaders of North Korea and the United States. They signed a joint statement, agreeing to security guarantees for North Korea, new peaceful relations, the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, recovery of soldiers' remains, and follow-up negotiations between high-level officials. Both leaders also met separately with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
The Kim–Xi meetings were a series of summits between North Korea and China during 2018 and 2019. North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un secretly met with Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping on March 25–28, 2018. Xi made a classified invitation to Kim to visit China, after which Kim visited Beijing and used his bullet proof train to travel to the three-day meeting. It is his first known out-of-country diplomatic trip since taking power. Kim and Xi had a second surprise meeting on May 7–8, 2018 in the city of Dalian. Kim and Xi had a third surprise meeting on June 19–20, 2018. They had a fourth surprise meeting on January 7–10, 2019 in Beijing, followed by a fifth official DPRK and China summit June 20–21, 2019 in the Forbidden City, Pyongyang.
Choe Son-hui is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of North Korea. Previously the First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, she was appointed Minister on 11 June 2022, becoming the first woman to hold the position and is one of few North Korean women holding a high-level office. In December 2024, she became a member of the Politburo of the Workers' Party of Korea.
The leaders of some countries or their representatives or spokespersons released public statements about the 2018 North Korea–United States summit. The summit received a mixed international reaction, with many countries expressing praise or hope for achieving a peace deal from the summit.
The Peace Treaty on Korean Peninsula is a proposed settlement to formally end military hostilities on the Korean Peninsula as a follow-up to the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement implemented by the United Nations after the Korean War. During the inter-Korean summit on April 27, 2018, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in signed the Panmunjom Declaration; the declaration involved an agreement about mutual efforts and action items for transforming the armistice agreement into a peace treaty with the cooperation of the United States and China. During the 2018 Trump–Kim summit, US president Donald Trump and Kim signed a Joint Statement which reaffirmed the Panmunjom Declaration. On November 23, 2023, North Korea terminated its 2018 agreement with South Korea.
The May 2018 inter-Korean summit was the second inter-Korean summit in 2018. On 26 May, North Korean state chairman Kim Jong Un and South Korean president Moon Jae-in met again in the joint Security Area, this time on the North Korean side in the Inter-Korean Peace House in the Unification Pavilion. The meeting took two hours, and unlike other summits it had not been publicly announced beforehand. Photos released by South Korea's presidential office showed Moon arriving at the northern side of the Panmunjom truce village and shaking hands with Kim's sister, Kim Yo-jong, before sitting down with Kim for their summit. Moon was accompanied by Suh Hoon, Director of the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, while Kim was joined by Kim Yong-chol, a former military intelligence chief who is now a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee tasked with inter-Korean relations. The meeting was largely centered around North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's upcoming summit with US President Donald Trump. Kim and Moon also embraced before Moon returned to South Korea. On 27 May, Moon stated in a public address that he and Kim agreed to meet again at "anytime and anyplace" without any formality and that the North Korean leader once again pledged to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula in accordance with the Panmunjom Declaration.
The 2019 North Korea–United States Hanoi Summit, commonly known as the Hanoi Summit, was a two-day summit meeting between North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. president Donald Trump, held at the French Colonial Hôtel Métropole in Hanoi, Vietnam, during February 27–28, 2019. It was the second meeting between the leaders of North Korea and the United States following their first meeting in Singapore the year prior.
The 2018–19 Korean peace process was initiated to resolve the long-running Korean conflict and denuclearize Korea. International concerns about North Korea's nuclear weapons came to a head in 2017, when they posed a direct threat to the United States. At the same time, Moon Jae-in was elected president of South Korea with the promise of returning to the Sunshine Policy, favoring good relations with North Korea. A series of summits were held between North Korea's Kim Jong Un, South Korea's Moon, and Donald Trump of the United States. Trump became the first sitting US President to meet a North Korean leader and to enter North Korean territory. Kim became the first North Korean leader to enter South Korean territory. Moon became the first South Korean President to give a speech in North Korea. In parallel to this, a number of cultural exchanges began. Tensions were lowered on both sides of the DMZ.
The 2019 North Korea–Russia summit was a summit meeting between North Korea and Russia where North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on 25 April 2019.
The 2019 Koreas–United States DMZ Summit was a one-day summit held at the Korean Demilitarized Zone between North Korean chairman Kim Jong Un, U.S. president Donald Trump, and South Korean president Moon Jae-in, following the 2019 G20 Osaka summit. Trump briefly stepped over the border at 3:45 PM (GMT+9) on June 30, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president had set foot on North Korean soil. It was also the second time since the end of the Korean War in 1953 that a North Korean leader entered the South's territory, following the April 2018 inter-Korean summit. Senior White House advisors Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner also attended the summit, with Ivanka Trump and U.S. envoy to South Korea Harry B. Harris Jr. holding a meeting with Kim later broadcast on North Korean television.
Howard Lee, known professionally as Howard X, is a Hong Kong-born Australian music producer, political satirist and media personality. He is best known as the world's first professional impersonator of Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
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