After a two-hour charter flight from Beijing, RT’s Igor Zhdanov and a small team of international journalists have arrived in North Korea, where they will witness Pyongyang close its only nuclear test site at Punggye-ri.
After Tuesday night’s trip to the nuclear site was called off, the team is staying in the resort city of Wonsan overnight. When they finally reach the nuclear site some 600 kilometers away, the Kim regime has promised a spectacle.
“The whole site will be razed to the ground and technical buildings reduced to rubble,” North Korean officials said.
The destruction will be witnessed by a group of around 20 journalists from Britain, Russia, China and the US. South Korean journalists were snubbed after Kim cancelled a summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week in response to joint military exercises between the US and South Korea.
While the closure of the Punggye-ri site is a much-touted gesture of goodwill, it is unclear if the site even remains usable. Following a powerful nuclear test there last year, a collapse left as many as 200 North Korean laborers dead.
