MOSCOW – Eight Russian diplomats and their families became unlikely social media sensations on Friday after crossing the North Korean border by hand-drawn train carriage.
With borders closed and travel restricted due to Covid-19, the diplomats had to be forced to abandon the hope of red carpet treatment during their departure from Pyongyang and instead take an extensive and unusual way of returning home.
After a 32-hour train ride and a two-hour bus ride to an area closer to the border, they loaded their trolley with children and luggage over the last 0.6-mile stretch that separates the two countries.
“The most important part of the route was a pedestrian crossing to the Russian side,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a Facebook post.
“They had to prepare the wagon in advance, put it on the track, place the luggage, put the children down and then leave … They had to push the whole assembly more than a kilometer by rail,” he said.
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The trip included crossing a railway bridge over the Tumen River, a body of water that serves as a natural border between North Korea and Russia, as well as China.
The Russian embassy’s third secretary, Vladislav Sorokin, was the ‘engine’ of the handcart, according to the ministry. The youngest passenger was his three-year-old daughter, Varya.
The video shows them being met on the Russian side by cheering Foreign Ministry staff, who greeted them as they completed their journey through the hilly, arid landscape. From there, they were taken to Vladivostok, the largest city in Russia’s far east, located along the Pacific coast.
“We do not leave our own,” the ministry said in a statement.
North Korea, already one of the most isolated countries in the world before the Covid-19 pandemic, closed its doors even tighter in an effort to fight the virus.
Last year, it severely restricted air and rail connections with neighboring China and Russia – the two countries that probably have the most normalized border contacts with Pyongyang.
The Russian mission in Pyongyang was one of the few left with staff. Most embassies were completely closed early last year, with staff flying with a North Korean charter.
North Korea has not reported internal Covid numbers and very little is known about the closed-country pandemic.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has rarely addressed the pandemic, but he made an unusual, tearful apology to the North Korean people last October for letting them down during this crisis – possibly suggesting that the country was hit much worse than it was allowed.
“Our people have placed trust in me, as high as the sky and deep as the sea, but I have failed to always fulfill it satisfactorily,” he told the Korean Times at the time.
“I’m sorry about that.”
Russia has historically maintained relations with North Korea, with which it shares a border. The two countries had normal trade relations before the pandemic, and North Korean workers were not unheard of in Russia’s far east.