About 600 Ecuadorians, many of them students, who fled the war in Ukraine have been repatriated on three humanitarian flights chartered by Quito, Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Holguín reported Monday.
“We have achieved our objective of bringing the majority of Ecuadorians safe and sound,” said the diplomat after the arrival of the third and last humanitarian flight, in which 143 Ecuadorians traveled. Holguín added that “we also have contact with those who have decided on their own responsibility, decision and freedom to stay there.”
Quito placed some 850 Ecuadorians in Ukraine, where they represented three out of every ten Latin Americans, after the Russian invasion began on February 24. 10% of them had their passports expired or did not have them because they had been withheld by Ukrainian universities, according to Holguín.
The humanitarian flights from Ecuador, which arrived on March 4 and in which some 50 Colombians, Peruvians and Ukrainians also traveled, left mainly from Poland, where a hundred Ecuadorians who escaped the war remain on their own.
Another 53 are still in Ukraine and another hundred were located in nations such as Hungary, Slovakia and Spain. More than 2.8 million people have already fled Ukraine, according to figures from Monday, the day the Kremlin did not rule out “taking full control” of the main cities that are already surrounded, which would imply a major military offensive.
