North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told a team of South Korean special envoys in Pyongyang for talks on Wednesday that he was still committed to denuclearization, state outlet Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Thursday.

Kim said it is his “personal will to completely remove the danger of armed conflict and horror of war from the Korean peninsula and turn it into the cradle of peace without nuclear weapons and free from nuclear threat,” according to the KCNA article.

But he also “repeated his vow of determination to denuclearize and said that the north and the south should further