Buses carrying the evacuees were able to succeed at the designated quarantine site after hours of clashes. The masked evacuees, exhausted by the long journey, looked out the windows of the buses as they drove slowly under a strong police escort.
The stones broke a window on one of the buses, but the evacuees appeared to be injured.
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Since dawn, several hundred citizens of the village of Novi Sanzhary in central Ukraine’s Poltava had cut a health centre to accommodate evacuees, fearing they would become infected. The protesters, some of whom gave the impression of being intoxicated, erected barricades, burned tires and clashed with police who moved to the transparent entrance. A protester tried to hit police lines with his car.
Nine police officers and one civilian were hospitalized, regional police said in a statement.
Ukrainian police said 24 protesters had been arrested. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who personally visited the site in an attempt to calm the crowd, said he was surprised by the attack.
“What we saw is disgraceful,” he said in televised commentary. “It’s one of the biggest disappointments of my life.”
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Ukrainian pre-inspector Volodymyr Zelenskiy intervened and said the protests showed “not the aspect of our character.” He tried to assure others that quarantined evacuees would not pose a danger to local residents.
In a post on his Facebook page, Zelenskiy said the evacuees from China were in good physical shape and would live in a medical center closed through the National Guard in the village as a precaution.
“In the next two weeks, it will be the most guarded facility in the country,” Zelenskiy said.
Ukrainian Health Minister Zoryana Skaletska said she will be enrolled in quarantined evacuees for two weeks to help allay villagers’ concerns. She suggested that citizens show sympathy for evacuees and under pressure that the quarantine facility was fully compliant with foreign standards.
“I was surprised by panic, rejection, negative emotions and aggression,” he said. “It’s an even bigger surprise for China’s evacuees.”
But the village’s municipal lawmakers promised to continue opposing the evacuation, saying the sanage formula of the sanatorium was connected to that of the village and ended up in a nearby wastewater treatment facility.
“We put the physical condition and lives of local citizens at risk, and we call for senior officials to take urgent action to prevent the Chinese from being sent here,” they said in a statement.
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Amid clashes between local citizens and police, Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk said he would promptly stop at the scene to oversee things.
In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with forty-five Ukrainians and 27 foreigners took off from Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic that lit more than 75,000 international people and killed more than 2,100.
The evacuees included others from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama and other countries.
In a statement, Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs thanked Ukraine for its “generosity” and China for its cooperation.
The plane stopped in Kazakhstan to leave Kazakh passengers. Later, he tried to land in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, but perhaps only because of bad weather conditions.
Instead, he flew to Kiev to refuel, and came to Kharkov.
Also on Thursday, the Russian embassy in Japan said two Russians aboard the quarantined Diamond Princess quarantine cruiser had been diagnosed with the virus. This leads to 3 the number of Russians aboard the vessel who showed carrying the virus.
Both will be transferred to a hospital in Japan for treatment, to the embassy.
In Slovenia, the government said two of the six Slovenian citizens on the cruise had been hospitalized in Japan after testing positive for the virus. The other four came back negative. Two of them have returned to Slovenia and will be quarantined at home for two weeks.
The Diamond Princess has been moored in Yokohama Harbor near Tokyo since February 4, when another 10 people on board tested positive for the virus. To date, 621 cases of the disease, which has been called COVID-19, have been shown among the original 3,711 people of the Princess Diamond on board.
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So far, Russia has reported two cases of the disease in its soil. Two Chinese citizens diagnosed with the virus and hospitalized in two other regions of Siberia in late January recovered and were discharged from hospitals.