MOSCOW, March 14. /TASS/. The number of requests to be evacuated from Ukraine to Russia or to Belarus has grown by over 12,000 during the past 24 hours, amounting overall to over 2.6 million, the chief of Russia’s National Defense Command Center Mikhail Mizintsev said on Monday.
"The daily monitoring of the coming requests shows that alone in the past 24 hours 12,247 people expressed their desire to escape from the horrors and outrage staged by the nationalists exactly to Russia and Belarus, not to the West. Overall, we have already 2,665,822 people in our database with concrete names and addresses from practically 2,000 settlements of Ukraine," Mizintsev said.
This is a huge number, he stressed. "There is a concrete individual behind each figure, his or her pain, sufferings, horror, and often - damaged mental and physical health. But on the other side, there is also hope for leaving behind the turmoil, aspiration for the freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the possibility to freely speak Russian, which is the native language for many, without looking back at the followers of Nazism, who are ready to shoot in the back," he stressed.