COVID restrictions forced diplomats to find an unorthodox path home.
It is not your standard diplomatic transport.
A group of Russian diplomats and their families were forced to use a manual railroad car to get to Russia from North Korea due to travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
A video released Thursday by Russia’s Foreign Ministry shows diplomats pushing the handcart, stacked with suitcases, along a railroad track through the barren landscape near North Korea’s northern border.
The ministry said the group had been working at its embassy in Pyongyang and was forced to improvise because travel connections between the two countries had been severed for more than a year.
“Because the borders have been closed for more than a year and passenger communication is suspended, it was necessary to get home by a long and hard road,” the ministry said in a post on social media, accompanying with a hashtag in Russian: “No man was left behind.”
The group of eight embassy officials and members of their families, including children, first made a 32-hour train journey and then a bus to reach the border area, the ministry said, where the car of hand was prepared and mounted on the tracks. Diplomats pushed the hand wagon for more than a mile to get it across the border.
In the video, the group smiles and cheers as it crosses a bridge to the Russian side of the border in Khasan, where the Foreign Ministry said the group was gathered by its representatives waiting with a bus. The group was driven 160 kilometers further to Vladivostok Airport.
The Russian ministry said one of the diplomats, Vladislav Sorokin, was secretary of the embassy.
North Korea closed its borders to international travel in January last year. The country has insisted it has no cases of COVID-19, a claim questioned by many experts.
Many countries have struggled to repatriate their citizens and diplomats during the pandemic, as international air travel closed and countries closed their borders. The U.S. State Department last April said it had evacuated 6,000 diplomatic officials from around the world as the pandemic spread, an unprecedented number.