Vladivostok, Russia—A UPF Ambassador for Peace without hands or feet traveled from west to east across Russia using a hand-operated bicycle.
More than a year after he started his journey in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, Alexei Kostyuchenko arrived in the Far Eastern port city of Vladivostok. The project, which covered a distance of 10,000 kilometers (more than 6,000 miles), was affiliated with the UPF Peace Road initiative.
After his arrival in Vladivostok, Mr. Kostyuchenko held a press conference on July 13, 2018, in the Press Center of the Primorsky (“Maritime”) Region administration together with the Department of Internal Policy of the Russian Federation.
Mr. Kostyuchenko traveled only in the warm season and spent the winter in Siberia before resuming his journey eastward. At a May 2017 meeting at the UPF-Russia Peace Embassy in Moscow, he was awarded a certificate as an Ambassador of Peace. He became very inspired by the ideas of the Peace Road initiative, and he started to call his run "The Peace Road."
He dedicated his hand-bike trip to the 75th anniversary of Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War (the end of World War II). Mr. Kostyuchenko joined with Ildus Yanyshev, a global bicyclist and businessman from the Urals city of Kazan, who is also a UPF Ambassador for Peace, to participate in both the Peace Road and Mr. Yanyshev’s Global Bike Tour of Peace and Goodwill.
The press conference was attended by Artyom Moiseenko of the Ark interregional public organization of the disabled; Olga Ivchenko from the Department of Internal Policy of the Primorsky Region; Margarita Samokhvalova of the Rotary Club; a representative of the Social Insurance Fund; and Semyon and Maria Sergienko of the Far East Russia branch of UPF.
During his stay in Vladivostok, Mr. Kostyuchenko was accommodated in the hostel on the Far Eastern Federal University campus. He had some excursions planned for his stay; he mentioned that it was his dream to put up a tent on the shore of the Sea of Japan and go for a swim.