The country has had previous experience in bring back people home in bulk – after the devastating tsunami in Thailand, for instance – yet the Covid-19 fallout came at an incomparably larger scale, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalist Anton Krasovsky for RTD’s ‘Epidemic’ series.

Sometimes they say sublimely: ‘we don’t leave our people behind.’ This was the exact same case.

Apart from the coordinated effort from the Russian government, a large part of the evacuation work was done by Russian diplomats, working on the ground worldwide. In Nepal, for instance, the diplomats set up a tent camp for stranded and broke tourists, providing the compatriots from their own pocket, Lavrov said.

“I was very nicely… well, I was not even surprised. I knew that for the most part our guys are very outgoing – and many missions got creative in this situation,” he said.

Counting the number of people in need of help proved to be very tricky – it was easy to find organized groups of tourists, but individuals who went abroad on their own and often without a return ticket were significantly harder to locate. Moreover, the coronavirus crisis triggered an exodus of Russian citizens, who left the country years ago.

“In addition to people who just went abroad to spend their holidays, there is another large group of Russian citizens who were studying abroad, receiving long-term treatment, or in permanent residence,” Lavrov said.

All of a sudden they’ve decided that their living conditions in the very same US, in New York, for instance, greatly ‘deteriorated’ over the pandemic.

A lot of people were in need of help, and the lists of people to be evacuated have been huge, Russia’s top diplomat said, adding that he personally expected even more people willing to return. At the beginning of the mass evacuation op, Russia’s authorities limited the number of returning people to 500 per day for the Moscow region and to 200 per day for the rest of the country – while the numbers have been exploding.

“As I said, it was particularly messy with those who were long gone to reside permanently elsewhere and suddenly decided to return. And so they began to fill in these lists. We evacuate, say, five thousand, and then the lists grow by another 10 thousand.”

Despite the efforts, several thousand compatriots still remain abroad, mainly in exotic locations very hard-to-reach for Russian aviation. Some people, however, just decided to stay put and wait out the pandemic wherever they were and refused the assistance.

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