Russian diplomats leave North Korea by rail by hand due to Covid-19 restrictions

North Korea’s borders have been effectively closed for months as part of the Kim Jong Un regime’s effort to keep Covid-19 at bay, and the few diplomats operating in Pyongyang have been stranded. The North Korean state-owned airline Air Koryo operates flights from Vladivostok in eastern Russia, but those flights have also been suspended for months.

The journey began by train. The Russians traveled for 32 hours on North Korea’s old, poorly maintained and infamous slow rail system. After that, they traveled by bus to the border for two hours, where the families had to order a railway car for their luggage and push off the rest of the way.

The embassy posted two photos of Vladislav Sorokin, the third secretary, pushing his family and their luggage along the train tracks while wearing thick winter clothes. The youngest of the crew was Sorokin’s 3-year-old daughter Varya.

Sorokin had to push the handcart for a kilometer, a bridge of which contains a bridge over the Tumen River that separates Russia from North Korea.

After the family reached the Russian station of Khasan, they were met by colleagues in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who helped them to get to the airport in Vladivostok.

Further insulation

The departure of the Sorokin family and other Russian diplomats means that Pyongyang’s already small foreign community, a valuable source of information about one of the world’s most withdrawn and mysterious countries, is shrinking even further.

Diplomats, aid workers and NGO staff chose to leave North Korea rather than walk ashore due to the country’s inflexible and strict border control. Foreigners who chose to stay in North Korea described an increasingly dire situation in Pyongyang, with grocery stores running out of food and people losing their jobs, according to Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora.

North Korea has decided to sever almost all its ties with the outside world by 2020 to prevent the influx of coronavirus cases. Experts believe Kim made the decision because he acknowledged that his country’s dilapidated health care system would be overwhelmed by an outbreak.

Matsegora said imports to North Korea had stopped almost completely since devastating typhoons hit the Korean Peninsula in September. “The North Korean leader has openly acknowledged that there is no full-fledged medical infrastructure here that meets modern requirements and is capable of tackling this problem,” he said in an interview with Russian news agency Interfax.

Kim’s strategy seems to have worked from the point of view of public health. North Korea did not report a major outbreak of Covid-19, and there were no indications that one had occurred, although experts doubt Pyongyang’s claim that the country has not seen a single case of the virus.

Food shortages

“Life has not been easy for us in Pyongyang,” Matsegora said. “During the months of self-isolation, the stock available on the shelves has diminished to a minimum. It is a challenge to buy even basic goods such as pasta, flour, vegetable oil and sugar, and there is no “decent clothes or shoes. something can be bought, it usually costs three or four times more than before the crisis.”

Matsegora’s remarks were surprising, as North Korea has closer ties with Russia than with virtually any country other than China. While Kim and other North Korean leaders acknowledged that the country’s economy was suffering from the virus, they did not acknowledge that the food supply was under stress.

WFP spokesman Kun Li said the organization was “not stopping its operations” in North Korea, but that it was facing the challenges that many industries faced during the pandemic.

“Our work has never stopped. Despite the challenges of providing food aid and supplies due to the Covid-19 controls, we introduced limited food in 2020; and we have more than 500,000 people, including vulnerable women. and children, with food reach and nutrition assistance, ‘Li said in a statement. “Our work is being continued by our national staff in Pyongyang and international staff from where they are temporarily based.”