Russian children will be sent on "vacation" to North Korea
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Photo: (open sources)
Vostok Intour travel agency is negotiating with North Korean partners about sending Russian schoolchildren on vacation to the Sondovon camp.
Inna Mukhina, director of the company, told NK News. According to her, the arrival of the first group will take place in mid-July. More than a dozen children accompanied by two adults will go to North Korea. Camp "Sondovon" is located near the port city of Wonsan on the east coast of the country and is equipped with an amusement park, water rides, a beach, a room with video games, and air hockey tables.
The shift will last two weeks and will include a vacation at Sondovon and visits to Pyongyang's sights with accommodation in a "Soviet-style" hotel.
A Russian who visited Sondovon twice in 2015-2016 said that the stay at the camp was accompanied by strict restrictions on movement and daily propaganda activities. Children were forced to sing songs in honor of Korean leaders, clean their monuments, and were shown a cartoon in which the US White House was bombed.
According to the Russian, the hotel and the camp served the same food - small pieces of chicken, rarely other meat, sometimes squid with rice and muffin buns. The North Koreans also sold rice vodka and cigarettes to the schoolchildren.
The last visits of Russian children to the camp were before the pandemic. Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of Primorsky Krai, proposed resuming such trips after the full-scale invasion began, but the initiative was not widely supported.
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Memorial to the fallen Moldovan soldiers of the Transnistrian War in Chisinau. Photo: Alexander Moisseenko
Thirty-three years ago, a ceasefire brought an end to the Transnistrian War—sometimes described by locals as the Russian-Moldovan War. Although the tensions officially ended in 1992, its consequences continue to shape Moldovan politics, society, and security — especially in view of the upcoming parliamentary elections.
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