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More than 1,300 Ukrainian citizens move to Sakhalin

The state programme of voluntary resettlement of compatriots to the Sakhalin region has been implemented since 2011
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, administrative center of Sakhalin region  ITAR-TASS/Yuriy Smityuk
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, administrative center of Sakhalin region
© ITAR-TASS/Yuriy Smityuk

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, June 2. /TASS/. More than 1,300 Ukrainian citizens who were forced to leave their homeland, have arrived in Russia’s Far Eastern Sakhalin region since August 2014. As many as 867 of them have joined the sub-programme of "assistance to voluntary resettlement of compatriots living abroad to the Sakhalin region," the regional employment agency told TASS on Tuesday. There are qualified builders, mining experts, financiers and social workers among the migrants.

The state programme of voluntary resettlement of compatriots to the Sakhalin region has been implemented since 2011. Thousands of highly qualified professionals have moved to the island region over this period.

A total of more than 282,000 people have moved to live in Russia within the programme framework, head of the Federal Migration Service (FMS) department for organisational work with compatriots Vitaly Yakovlev said previously. "If during the first years of the programme we were receiving about 9,000 people per year (in 2008 and 2009), then in 2014 we have for the first time managed to resettle more than 106,000 people," he said. "The main countries from where immigrants arrived in 2014 were Ukraine (39.2%) Kazakhstan (21.2%), Uzbekistan (13.9%), Moldova (8.5%) and Armenia (6.4%)."

The federal programme was created for the purposes of providing support to the Russian world. According to the Federal Migration Service, 106,000 compatriots returned to Russia last year, which almost two times exceeds the planned figures. This year, more than 21,000 citizens of Ukraine have been included in the government programme, and after the Ukrainian conflict started, almost one million Ukrainian residents have arrived in Russia.

Head of the Russian Federal Migration Service Konstantin Romodanovsky told TASS in an interview previously that "about 940,000 people from the southeast of Ukraine have urgently arrived to our country en masse, and about 300,000 of them have applied for the temporary asylum status, 170,000 have received a temporary residence permit.".