North Korea issues weapons testing warning 0:32
(CNN) -
Foreign diplomats and humanitarian personnel have fled North Korea en masse in recent months due to supply shortages and "unprecedented" restrictions on daily life imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, according to the US embassy. Russia in Pyongyang.
The embassy said in a statement on its official Facebook page that there are now only 290 expatriates in North Korea, including just nine ambassadors and four diplomats.
All foreign personnel working for NGOs and humanitarian organizations have left the country.
"Not everyone can withstand the severity of the unprecedented total restrictions, the pressing shortage of essential supplies, including medicines (and) the lack of opportunities to solve health problems," the embassy said in the statement, in the one who also expressed his good wishes to some 38 foreign nationals who finished their post-North Korea quarantine in China.
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Before the covid-19 pandemic, Russia had one of the largest diplomatic missions in North Korea, but its presence has recently declined.
Living for months with strict public health measures and coping with extreme shortages of "necessary goods," including medicines, seems to have taken its toll.
North Korea's borders have been blocked for months as part of the Kim Jong Un regime's efforts to keep COVID-19 at bay, stranding the few diplomats operating inside Pyongyang.
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North Korean state airline Air Koryo operates flights from Vladivostok in eastern Russia, but the route has also been suspended for months.
Apparently getting out of North Korea is quite difficult.
In February, several Russian diplomats spent more than 34 hours trying to leave the country, a grueling journey that ended with at least one envoy pushing their luggage and their young children in a train cart.
Experts believe that Kim decided to cut almost all of North Korea's ties to the outside world because he admitted that his country's health system, so deteriorated, would be overwhelmed by a Covid-19 outbreak.
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Kim's strategy appears to have worked from a public health standpoint.
North Korea has not reported any sizeable covid-19 outbreak, and there have been no indications that one has occurred, although experts doubt Pyongyang's claim that the country has not seen a single case of the virus.
People walk down a snow-covered street near the Arc de Triomphe in Pyongyang on January 12.
Diplomats, aid workers and NGO staff have chosen to leave North Korea before risking being stranded due to the country's rigid and inflexible border controls, reducing Pyongyang's already small expatriate community, a valuable asset. source of information on one of the most hermetic countries in the world.
However, Russian diplomats have helped fill in some of the gaps in their descriptions of life on the ground in the North Korean capital.
Russia's ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora recently said grocery stores began to run out of food following Pyongyang's decision to almost completely halt imports in September.
The comments were surprising, given that North Korea maintains closer relations with Russia than with almost any other country except China.
While Kim and other North Korean leaders have admitted that the country's economy is suffering from the virus, they have not admitted that its food supply is under pressure.
CNN's Zarah Ullah contributed reporting.
