North Korea will not agree to resume six-party talks on its nuclear program until the United States agrees to a peace treaty, a pro-North Korean newspaper in Japan said Friday.

North Korea and U.S.-backed South Korea are formally still at war even though the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice. No peace treaty has been signed.

"In a situation where American-North Korean relations in the regime of armistice are not replaced with peaceful relations it is impossible to give up the means of nuclear deterrence," Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo said.

U.S. special envoy to North Korea Stephen Bosworth on Thursday finished three days of talks in Pyongyang that the secretive communist state said deepened mutual understanding and narrowed differences between the two sides.

Bosworth has described the three-day talks as "useful" but said he did not know when talks would start again.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday that Bosworth would visit Moscow next week for talks with Russian diplomats, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The six-party talks, which began in 2003, broke down in April when North Korea walked out of the negotiating process over a UN Security Council resolution condemning its test of a ballistic missile earlier that month.

The North recently hinted that it was willing to return to the talks, but insisted it first negotiate directly with the United States to repair "hostile relations."

MOSCOW, December 11 (RIA Novosti)