Emergencies Ministry Sends 2 Planes to Syria to Evacuate Russians

By The Moscow Times

Jan. 23, 2013

The Emergency Situations Ministry sent two airplanes to Beirut to evacuate Russian citizens from Syria on Tuesday, news reports said.

Irina Rossius, the official spokeswoman for the ministry, told Interfax that together the two planes could accommodate up to 100 people.

As for the number of Russian citizens hoping to leave the war-torn country, the official spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Alexander Lukashevich said only that "the issue is very sensitive, for understandable reasons," the BBC's Russian service reported.

The Foreign Ministry first announced plans to evacuate Russian citizens in December. At that time, the ministry said that the consular register listed some 5,000 Russian citizens as residing in Syria.

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