Russian planes head to Syria for evacuees

Agence France Presse — English
July 19, 2006 Wednesday 2:58 PM GMT

Three Russian airplanes left Moscow on Wednesday for Syria to pick up
Russians evacuated from Lebanon amid the current crisis, the emergency
situations ministry said.

The planes were to pick up several hundred people evacuated by bus
from Lebanon to Syria.

"Three planes left today. We can’t say when they will return. They
are on stand-by" to bring back evacuated Russians, the ministry’s
press service said.

A first group of 270 people, mainly women and children, crossed into
Syria on Tuesday and about 1,000 more people were to follow.

Those being evacuated include not only Russians but citizens of other
ex-Soviet states including Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine,
Russian officials said.

France and Greece have both offered to help evacuate Russians by ship,
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

On Monday a first group of Russians arrived in Moscow after being
evacuated from the Gaza Strip.

The daily newspaper Vremya Novostei said that Israeli authorities had
prevented some Russian women who were leaving Gaza from taking their
children with them on the grounds that the children, having Palestinian
fathers, were considered "not so much Russians as Palestinians".

Also on Wednesday the ex-Soviet state of Armenia said it had begun
evacuating up to 1,200 of its citizens from Lebanon as well as members
of the 120,000-strong Armenian diaspora, to whom it was offering free
three-month visas.