Aeroflot and S7 Airlines have completed the program of evacuation flights from the UAE. The last Aeroflot flight SU 521 landed in Sheremetyevo at 0:33 Moscow time on March 12, S7 Airlines delivered passengers to Novosibirsk at 2:40 local time on flight No. 5786 from Dubai with a technical stop in Samarkand. Both carriers have suspended flights to the UAE until the situation in the region normalizes.
In total, from March 2 to March 11, Russian and foreign airlines operated 284 flights and transported about 59 thousand passengers from the countries of the Middle East, the Ministry of Transport reported. Of these, the Aeroflot Group operated 46 flights from Dubai and Abu Dhabi from March 3 to March 11, carrying 13.1 thousand passengers - 9.5 thousand on Aeroflot flights, the rest on Pobeda.
The evacuation was required after the United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran on February 28. Ten states in the region have fully or partially closed their airspace. According to ATOR, at that time there were about 50 thousand Russians in the UAE - organized tourists, independent travelers and transit passengers.
In addition to the UAE, Russians were blocked in Qatar (about 1 thousand organized tourists), Bahrain (about 700 people), Saudi Arabia (about 1 thousand people, mainly pilgrims), as well as in the Maldives, Seychelles and Sri Lanka - about 10 thousand people were stuck there due to the impossibility of flying through the transit hubs of the Middle East. From Iran, the Ministry of Emergency Situations evacuated 282 Russian citizens by special flights through Azerbaijan. To date, the ban on flights remains in five states of the region.
