North Korea has appointed Choe Kang Il, a longtime expert on U.S. affairs and diplomat, as its new ambassador to Austria, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said in a statement on Saturday.

Choe — who previously worked as a deputy director general at the foreign ministry’s North America Department — had served as one of North Korea’s top diplomats in talks with the U.S., meeting with State Department officials for a number of working-level negotiations during a warming of relations between the two countries in 2018.

Prior to that he had nurtured a decidedly more hard-line image, defending