COVID restrictions forced the diplomats to find an unorthodox way home.
It’s not your standard diplomatic transport.
A group of Russian diplomats and their families were required to use a hand-powered rail car to get home to Russia from North Korea due to travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
A video published by Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday shows diplomats pushing the handcar, stacked with their suitcases, across a railroad through the arid landscape near North Korea’s northern border.
The ministry said the group had worked in its embassy in Pyongyang and was forced to improvise because travel links between the two countries had been severed for over a year.
“With the borders closed for over a year and communication with passengers suspended, it was necessary to go home by a long and difficult road,” the ministry said in a social media post, accompanied by a hashtag in Russian: “No man left behind.”
The group of eight embassy employees and their relatives, including children, first took a 32-hour train journey and then a bus to reach the border area, the ministry said, where the handcar was primed and mounted on the rails. The diplomats pushed the handcar more than a mile to get it across the border.
In the video, the group smiles and cheers as they cross a bridge to the Russian side of the border at Khasan, where the State Department said the group was met by representatives waiting for a bus. The group was then driven another 160 miles to Vladivostok airport.
The Russian ministry said one of the diplomats, Vladislav Sorokin, was the embassy’s secretary.
North Korea closed its borders to international travel in January last year. The country has insisted that it has no cases of COVID-19, a claim that is questioned by many experts.
Many countries struggled to repatriate their citizens and diplomats during the pandemic, when international air travel was halted and countries closed their borders. The US State Department said last April that it had evacuated 6,000 diplomatic personnel from around the world as the pandemic spread, an unprecedented number.