Vladimir Putin to send Russian children to North Korean summer camps

Vladimir Putin met Kim Jong-un in June and promised to send children from Movement of the First to the camp - VLADIMIR SMIRNOV/AFP

Vladimir Putin plans to send Russian children to a summer camp in North Korea where activities include polishing the statues of leaders.

Grigory Gurov, the head of Putin’s Movement of the First youth organisation, announced the plan despite opposition from worried Russian parents.

“We will now form our delegation,” he said. “Conditions there are good.”

The children will be the first Russian group for five years to visit the Songdowon camp, built on North Korea’s eastern shore by dictator Kim Jong-un’s grandfather in 1960.

Accounts from Russian adult leaders on previous trips described Songdowon camp as a cross between a boarding house with regular blackouts, dawn wake-ups and roll calls, and a Disney-themed water park.

Artem Samsonov, a former Communist party official, visited the camp in 2015 before being imprisoned in 2022 for molesting a child.

He said that children were woken at 6.30am to clean the area in front of statues of Kim’s father and grandfather.

“We received special attention and were given not brooms, but special pads and were allowed to wipe the statue itself,” he wrote on the Livejournal blogging platform next to photographs of Russian children polishing a stone plinth.

Samsonov described a tightly packed day that included enforced exercise, state-approved lessons, cleaning and a disco. As for the food, he said “they always give you soup, rice, potatoes”.

The initiative is the latest sign of blossoming relations between the two countries.

North Korea has become a vital arms supplier for the Kremlin since Kim visited Russia last year. The country is thought to have sent five million artillery shells and dozens of missiles to bolster the forces against Ukraine.

When Putin visited Pyongyang, the capital, last month to sign a military pact and to give Kim a luxury car, he also promised to send children from the Movement of the First to the Songdowon camp.

Putin created the Movement of the First in 2022 a few months after his invasion of Ukraine to instill Kremlin ideology among children.

Its teenage members wear red berets and red neck scarves and are often seen carrying flags at official ceremonies.

But comments from Russian parents worrying about sending their children to North Korea have filled social media, with one joking that the only escape will be to walk “through the jungle to South Korea”.

One user, though, tried to reassure sceptics that her trip to Songdowon in 2017 had been better than visits to a Russian youth camp in occupied Crimea.

“Compared to Artek, it’s a good camp,” she said. “It has the same pools, water parks, stadiums, just with a different culture and completely without the internet.”

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