North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s possible trip to Russia this month might be like his first one in 2019 — a rattling, 20-hour ride aboard a green-and-yellow armored train that is a quirky symbol of his family’s dynastic leadership
FILE - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, arrives at the main train station to leave Russia in Vladivostok, Russia, on April 26, 2019. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s possible trip to Russia might be like his first one in 2019, a rattling, 20-hour ride aboard a green-and-yellow armored train that is a quirky symbol of his family’s dynastic leadership.
Putin, for his part, now prefers to avoid airplanes and travel on a special armored train since his decision to invade Ukraine in early 2022, according to Gleb Karakulov, a defector from Putin's secretive elite security service. Since closing his country's borders in early 2020 to guard against the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim hasn't met any foreign leader.
According to an account published in 2002 by Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who accompanied Kim Jong ll on a three-week trip to Moscow a year earlier, the train carried cases of expensive French wine and passengers could feast on live lobster and pork barbeque. It’s not immediately clear whether Kim Jong Un would choose to travel to Russia on a train again when he seems equally comfortable with flying. When Kim jetted off to the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian in May 2018 for his second meeting with Xi, he became the first North Korean leader to fly abroad in 32 years. The last time a North Korean leader had publicly gone abroad by air had been Kim Il Sung's flight to the Soviet Union in 1986.
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