VLADIVOSTOK, November 10. /TASS/. More than 400 Ukrainian refugee-families took part in a regional program for voluntary resettlement of compatriots residing abroad, increasing the population of Russia’s Far Eastern Primorye Territory by almost a thousand citizens, Maksim Beloborodov, head of the Federal Migration Service’s regional department told TASS.

Starting this year, the Primorye Territory has harboured over 6,000 Ukrainian refugees in total, with 1,300 of them within the framework of the federal program. The program will be in effect for three years and by 2016 the government expects around 6,000 Ukrainian families to be accommodated in the region.

Each participant of the program residing abroad will receive a material aid amounting to 240,000 rubles ($5,200), while each family member will get a 120,000-ruble benefit ($2,600). Those who already are legal citizens of Primorye can also take part in the program; they and their family members will be supported with 80,000 ($3,690) and 40,000 ($1,800) rubles respectively. The program offers to transfer and accommodate participants to any of the 19 cities in the territory, except for Primorye’s capital city of Vladivostok.

The federal resettlement program, which is in action since 2012, presumes allocating more than one billion roubles ($21.2 million) for protection and preservation of ethnic Russian people abroad, as well as for providing humanitarian aid and social support to the youth. One of the largest Russian communities is located in Ukraine, as 8.3 million people consider themselves to be Russians and some 14.3 million more claim the Russian language to be their mother tongue.

Russia’s Federal Migration Service reported more than 105,000 Ukrainians to have applied for temporary accommodation in Russia this October. Besides, over 35,000 Ukrainians were eager to participate in the federal resettlement program in the country.