Russian diplomats were forced to use a hand-held train carriage to return home from North Korea

This is not your standard diplomatic transport.

A group of Russian diplomats and their families were forced to use a railcar by hand to travel from North Korea to Russia due to travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

A video released by the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday shows diplomats pushing the handcart with their suitcases stacked along a train track through the arid landscape near North Korea’s northern border.

The ministry said the group was working in its embassy in Pyongyang and was forced to improvise because travel links between the two countries had been cut off for more than a year.

“As the borders have been closed for more than a year and passenger communication has been suspended, it was necessary to come home along a long and difficult road,” the ministry said in a social media post, accompanying a hashtag in Russian: “No man left behind.”

The ministry first undertook the group of eight embassy staff and family members, including children, 32 hours by train and then by bus to reach the border area. The diplomats pushed the car over more than a mile to get it across the border.

In the video, the group smiles and cheers as he drives across a bridge to the Russian side of the border at Khasan, where the foreign ministry said the group’s representatives met who were waiting by a bus. The group then drove another 160 kilometers to Vladivostok Airport.

The Russian ministry said one of the diplomats, Vladislav Sorokin, was an embassy secretary.

North Korea closed its borders for international travel in January last year. The country has insisted that there are no cases of COVID-19, which many experts doubt.

Many countries struggled during the pandemic to bring back their citizens as well as their diplomats because international air travel closed and countries closed their borders. The US State Department said in April last year that it had evacuated 6,000 diplomats from around the world when the pandemic spread, an unprecedented number.