BRUSSELS – The United Nations Secretary-General said on Wednesday he hoped that the planned summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States would go ahead.

Antonio Guterres remarks come after Pyongyang hinted it could cancel the forthcoming summit in Singapore on June 12 over perceived aggression from Washington.

“I hope that in the end common sense will prevail, and I hope that the summit will take place and (...) that (it) will be successful,” Guterres said at a press conference in Brussels after meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and other commissioners.

North Korea announced earlier on Wednesday that it could cancel the proposed historic summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over suggestions from Washington that the regime should completely and immediately dismantle its atomic program.

The warning comes after months of improved ties and bilateral progress between the isolated communist regime and the international community regarding the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

“If the US is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider the DPRK-US summit,” Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s vice minister for foreign affairs, said in a statement published by official news agency KCNA.