We're back in familiar territory. North Korea is again issuing cryptic threats that officials around the world are scrambling to decipher.

Axar.az reports citing CNN.

A so-called "Christmas gift" for the United States, a year-end deadline and a new path have all been mooted by the Kim Jong Un regime in the past 12 months.

Kim and Trump have met three times in the hopes of striking a deal that would see North Korea trade its nuclear weapons and the missiles used to fire them in exchange for sanctions relief and normalized relations.

Whether this is actually achievable remains uncertain. Even the sharpest and most experienced minds studying North Korea say their predictions as to what happens next are educated guesses.

But there does appear to be some consensus forming -- that North Korea is frustrated by what it perceives as a lack of flexibility and creativity from US negotiators. And perhaps more worryingly, whatever it does next will be designed to capture the attention of US President Donald Trump