The Tunisian Department of Foreign Affairs renews its appeal to other members of the Tunisian community in Ukraine wishing to be repatriated to contact the Tunisian embassies in Moscow or Warsaw as soon as possible
Tunisia announced on Saturday that it is preparing to repatriate its nationals from Ukraine once they have arrived on Romanian or Polish territory.
This is what emerged from the press release published by the Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and consulted by the Anadolu Agency.
The Crisis Unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Immigration and Tunisians Abroad, responsible for monitoring the situation in Ukraine, held a virtual meeting with representatives of the Ministry of National Defense and the airline national “Tunisair”, in order to prepare well to secure the return of the Tunisian community to Ukraine, indicated the Tunisian diplomacy.
The crisis unit, created within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, remains in a permanent state of meeting to monitor and respond to any development that may arise in this case and ensure the evacuation of Tunisian nationals in Ukraine.
And the ministry emphasizes that the Tunisian Defense and the national carrier are fully prepared to secure the necessary flights from Romania or Poland.
The Tunisian Foreign Affairs Department renews its appeal to other members of the Tunisian community in Ukraine wishing to be repatriated to contact the Tunisian embassies in Moscow or Warsaw as soon as possible to update their data in order to be registered on the lists of Tunisians who will be evacuated.
The head of the Association of the Tunisian community in Ukraine, Tarek Aloui, said on Sunday that more than 1,500 Tunisians reside in the country, spread over 4 cities: Odessa on the Black Sea, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkiv on the border. with Russia, as well as a small number in the capital, Kiev.
In addition, Tunisian President Kais Saied said on Thursday that a number of his fellow citizens residing in Ukraine were evacuated to Poland via the land border.
Thursday at dawn, Russia had launched a military operation in Ukraine. The Russian intervention provoked angry reactions in several countries around the world which called for tougher sanctions against Moscow.
The Donbas crisis and Russia’s military intervention
In 2014, following popular protests that rocked Ukraine, the Head of State Viktor Yanukovych fled the country, giving way to a pro-Western government. The ensuing crisis saw Russia invade Crimea and illegally annex this Ukrainian territory, then support the independence claims of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, mainly Russian-speaking.
Deadly clashes triggered in the wake of the unilateral proclamation of the independence of the two Ukrainian regions, had then opposed the separatist forces supported by Russia and the army of Kyiv.
With diplomacy regaining the initiative in 2014 and 2015, Kyiv’s backers in the West brokered a ceasefire agreement with Moscow, known as the Minsk Accords, which although served to defuse the crisis, been marked by numerous violations of this truce, costing the lives of some 14,000 Ukrainians on both sides.
When Russia began deploying tens of thousands of troops along the border regions with Ukraine in late 2021, the United States and its Western allies claimed that Moscow was preparing to invade Ukraine. , threatening Vladimir Putin with heavy sanctions if he were to undermine the sovereignty of Ukraine and its territorial integrity.
Moscow, which has constantly denied any attempt to invade the former Soviet republic, nevertheless decided to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, then, on February 24, to launch a military intervention on the Ukrainian territory to, in the words of Vladimir Putin, defend the populations threatened with “genocide by Kyiv” and “liberate Ukraine from Nazism and militarism, thereby calling on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms.
