North Korea on Tuesday said because the US ignored a year-end deadline for talks, it is no longer bound by any commitments to halt its nuclear testing and the firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“We found no reason to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment that the other party fails to honor,” Ju Yong Chol, an envoy at North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, told a UN-backed Conference on Disarmament, Reuters reported.

He decried the financial sanctions slapped on President Kim Jong Un’s government as “the most brutal and inhuman,” and warned that if the US “persists in such hostile policy,” denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will never happen.

“If the United States tries to enforce unilateral demands and persists in imposing sanctions, North Korea may be compelled to seek a new path,” Ju added.

The notification that Pyongyang is no longer bound by its commitments comes after the Kim regime last month threatened to send a “Christmas gift” to the US as the year-end deadline to jump-start stalled talks neared.

The “gift,” expected to be in the form of a nuclear test or test-firing of a ballistic missile, never happened.

President Trump has met Kim three times, most recently last June when Trump became the first US president to walk into North Korea.

Negotiations have failed to make progress because Kim’s government is seeking an end to the sanctions in exchange for putting limits on its nuclear goals.