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Reuters | | Posted by Zarafshan Shiraz
About 100 Russians flew to North Korea on Friday for a personal tour, turning into the primary international group to go to the reclusive state following the Covid-19 pandemic in a landmark journey summed up by the Russian embassy as “Pyongyang opens its door.”
North Korea shuttered its borders with a few of the tightest restrictions through the pandemic, in a single incident capturing lifeless a South Korean who floated unauthorised into its waters.
An Air Koryo flight, operated by North Korea with an ageing fleet of principally Russian-made plane, carried the 100 guests to the Pyongyang worldwide airport, the Russian embassy mentioned in a Fb publish on Friday.
The group included individuals within the tourism enterprise and “travellers from actually all components of Russia from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok” who will spend 4 days taking in sights within the North together with a serious ski resort, it mentioned.
“We are going to sit up for new encounters with vacationers from Russia!” it mentioned. The ski resort it talked about was a high-profile improvement venture spearheaded by North Korea’s chief Kim Jong Un after he took energy in 2011.
South Korea’s Yonhap information company earlier cited Russia’s Tass information company as saying that 97 Russians, together with teen ski athletes, departed from Russia’s far japanese metropolis of Vladivostok on the primary group tour to North Korea for the reason that pandemic.
The go to comes after Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin met north of Vladivostok in September and pledged nearer financial and navy cooperation amid costs by Washington that Pyongyang was serving to Putin within the conflict in Ukraine.
This story has been revealed from a wire company feed with out modifications to the textual content. Solely the headline has been modified.