MOSCOW, April 3 (RIA Novosti) - Russia carried out its largest ever number of humanitarian missions abroad last year, rendering international assistance 75 times, Emergency Ministry spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky told RIA Novosti Thursday.
"Due to a significant uptake in the numbers and proportions of emergency situations globally ... we have staged 75 emergency operations, including 26 humanitarian ones," Drobyshevsky said.
Such missions mainly consisted of evacuation operations of citizens and airlifts of emergency victims.
"We traditionally consider CIS, CSTO member states, as well as Russia's neighbors and strategic partners to be our priority," Dobryshevsky said.
Russia rendered humanitarian and technical assistance to 22 countries last year, including the United States, China and Syria. As many as 1,200 Russian nationals were pulled out of foreign countries as part of its humanitarian response operations.
