Russian diplomats flee North Korea with a hand truck

For just over a year, diplomats had been unable to leave North Korea after Pyongyang sealed off its borders because of the coronavirus. Deciding to leave on their own, the group traveled 32 hours by train and two more hours by bus to reach the North Korean-Russian border.

Then came “the hardest part”: crossing into Russia, the Foreign Ministry wrote on Facebook.

To do so, the group mounted a specially made wooden cart on the railroad tracks, loaded it with their belongings — including their children — and “went out,” pushing the car by hand for about a mile. until he entered Russian territory, the ministry said.

The group of Russians included the embassy’s third secretary, Vladislav Sorokin, and his 3-year-old daughter Varya, who was the group’s youngest traveler, according to the ministry.

A photo posted on Facebook by the ministry showed three adults pushing the makeshift cart along the tracks with three children sitting behind large suitcases and boxes, perched on what appears to be a bright red padded bench.

Passengers pushed the cart across a bridge over the Tumannaya River and finally reached the Russian border station at Khasan, a settlement in the far east of the country, where they were gathered by office officials. of the Vladivostok Foreign Ministry.

The regional administration then provided a bus, “which delivered the compatriots … to Vladivostok airport” and headed to Moscow on Friday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that the diplomatic career “is very difficult and difficult.”

“It can look nice and elegant, when in fact this race is very hard, intense, it’s a complete ordeal,” he added. “Sometimes episodes like this can happen too.”

Calls for comments on Russian diplomats’ trip to the North Korean embassy in Moscow went unanswered.

Sorokin, the third secretary, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that the border guards who met them in Khasan “had such expressions, as if they saw these cars every day, which of course that is not the case “.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Russian radio station Komsomolskaya Pravda that the route of the embassy staff was the most efficient. The alternative would be to travel around China. In that case, however, they would have had to be quarantined for three weeks and “the trip would take a month,” he said.

Ms. Zakharova said the foreign ministry “went to Pyongyang with a request to help our diplomats” several times, but unfortunately it was not the first time Russian citizens had to leave Korea. North with a railroad car, he said.

Anastasia Chernitskaya, a press attaché at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that the truck was manufactured by the RasonConTrans construction joint venture between Russia and North Korea. A company representative told the news agency that the railway wagon was specifically manufactured for emergency transport of people across the bridge over the Tumannaya River, the news agency reported.

The dramatic journey of embassy employees comes when North Korea appears particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, due to the country’s poverty and weak health infrastructure.

Sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council following the most recent nuclear tests in Pyongyang block imports of metal objects and computers, creating barriers for certain medical tools and equipment. The regime’s access to foreign banks is also restricted.

North Korea has reported zero coronavirus infections, but at the same time has asked several European embassies how it could get the vaccines, according to an exclusive report published in The Wall Street Journal last month.

The country has submitted an application to receive the Covid-19 virus fired by Covax, a global alliance that helps lower-income countries insure vaccines, with the help of the World Health Organization.

Russia and North Korea have been allies for a long time, and the Kremlin has urged the United Nations to consider easing sanctions.

Alexander Matsegora, Russia’s ambassador to North Korea, said on the embassy’s Facebook page earlier this month that “thanks to the stricter bans and restrictions, [North Korea] it turned out to be the only country that did not have the infection ”. He added that he has “no doubt” that if even a Covid-19 case had been discovered in Pyongyang, the embassy would have been closed.

—Timothy Martin in Seoul contributed to this article.

Write to Ann M. Simmons to [email protected]