Donald Trump now wants to focus on resolving "the North Korean issue" now that he has concluded a memorandum of understanding with Iran aimed at ending the conflict in the Middle East, the South Korean president said Friday.

"President Trump said the time has come to pay attention to the North Korean issue," Lee Jae Myung told reporters in Seoul, revealing details of his meeting with the US president at the G7 summit in Evian.

The South Korean president also said he told Mr. Trump that "sanctions and pressure" imposed on North Korea because of its nuclear program were "ineffective".

"The effectiveness of sanctions has decreased due to military cooperation between North Korea and Russia related to the war in Ukraine," he continued.

"Even a small amount of aid from Russia is of great use to North Korea," he said.

Mr. Lee wrote on X that he had had "in-depth conversations with Donald Trump about peace on the Korean Peninsula and relations between Korea and the United States, and significant progress was made."

The two Koreas technically remain at war, as their 1950-1953 conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, and they are separated by a demilitarized zone along which runs the border.

- Trump's signals to Kim -

Kim Jong Un has recently sought to bolster his stature with his allies by sending troops and munitions to support Russia's war against Ukraine.

He also received Chinese President Xi Jinping in Pyongyang, shortly after the latter held back-to-back summits in Beijing with Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Neither official statements from Pyongyang nor those from Beijing mentioned the issue of North Korean denuclearization, which experts interpreted as tacit acceptance by China.

Since the failure in 2019 of a Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi on issues of denuclearization and sanctions relief, Pyongyang has repeatedly declared itself to be an "irreversible" nuclear state.

Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kim three times during his first term, once declaring that they had "fallen in love," as he sought to strike a long-desired denuclearization deal.

But no tangible progress has been made.

On Sunday, a few hours after announcing an agreement with Iran, Mr. Trump posted on social media an uncaptioned photograph of himself with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, taken during their meeting in Singapore in 2018.

Mr. Trump intensified his efforts to reach out to Mr. Kim during a trip to Asia last year, stating he was "100%" open to a meeting. The offer went unanswered.

The US president even went against decades of American policy by declaring that North Korea was "in a way a nuclear power".