Senior diplomats of the United States, Mongolia and South Korea held their first trilateral meeting last week to discuss North Korea’s rapid development of nuclear and missile capabilities, the State Department said Friday.

At the meeting, held Tuesday in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, the diplomats agreed on the necessity of resuming dialogue with North Korea despite its unprecedented number of ballistic missile launches since the start of 2022.

Mark Lambert, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and his Mongolian and South Korean counterparts, G.Byambasuren and Choi Yong Jun, voiced willingness to hold a three-way meeting regularly on a rotating basis in each of the countries, it said. Mongolia has diplomatic ties with North Korea.

During the inaugural meeting, the three also expressed “deep concern” over the risk of nuclear weapons use in Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and discussed a range of other major global and regional issues, including their efforts to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific, the department said.

The United States, Japan and Mongolia launched similar trilateral talks in 2015.

According to the U.S. department, a conference on Northeast Asian security, which Mongolia started hosting in 2014, will be held for two days from June 15 in its capital.

The conference, known as the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, has provided rare opportunities for countries such as Japan, which has never had diplomatic ties with North Korea, to interact with officials from Pyongyang.