NOVI SARZHANY, Ukraine — Ukraine’s effort to quarantine more than 70 people evacuated from China over the new virus outbreak plunged into chaos Thursday as local residents opposing the move engaged in violent clashes with police.
Buses carrying evacuees were finally able to reach the designated place of quarantine after hours of clashes.
Earlier, several hundred residents in Ukraine’s Poltava region blocked the road to a sanitarium where the evacuees are to be quarantined because they feared they could become infected. Demonstrators put up road blocks, burned tires and resisted riot police who moved to clear access.
More than 10 people were detained, and Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov personally visited the site of the protests to try to calm the crowd down.
Avakov urged the protesters “not to fall for provocations and be understanding of the necessity for these temporary measures.”
“The situation is rather heated,” Poltava regional police spokesman Yuri Sulayev said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy weighed in, saying the protests showed “not the best side of our character.” He tried to reassure people that the quarantined evacuees wouldn’t pose any danger to residents of the village of Novi Sanzhary.
In a statement published on his Facebook page, Zelenskiy said the people evacuated from China are healthy and will live in a closed medical center run by the National Guard in the village as a precaution.
“In the next two weeks it will probably be the most guarded facility in the country,” Zelenskiy said.
But municipal legislators in the village vowed to continue opposing the evacuation, saying that the sanitarium’s sewage system is linked to the one in the village.
“We can’t allow putting the health and life of local residents at risk, and demand that top officials take urgent moves to prevent people from China from being put here,” they said in a statement.
Amid the clashes between local residents and police, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk said he will immediately fly to the site to personally oversee things.
In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign nationals took off from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak that has infected more than 75,000 people worldwid e and killed over 2,100.
Those evacuated included people from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama and other countries.
The plane stopped in Kazakhstan to drop off Kazakh passengers. Later, it sought to land in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, but could not due to bad weather conditions.
Instead it flew to Kyiv to refuel, and eventually arrived in Kharkiv.
Also Thursday, the Russian Embassy in Japan said that two more Russians aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan have been diagnosed with the virus. That raises to three the number of Russians on the ship confirmed to have the virus.
The two will be transferred to a hospital in Japan for treatment, according to the embassy.
In Slovenia, authorities said two of six Slovenian citizens who were on the cruise ship have been hospitalized in Japan after testing positive for the virus. The four others have tested negative. Two of them have arrived back in Slovenia and will be quarantined at home for two weeks.
The Diamond Princess has been docked in the Yokohama port near Tokyo since Feb. 4, when 10 people on board tested positive for the virus. So far 621 cases of the disease, which has been named COVID-19, have been confirmed among the the Diamond Princess’s original 3,711 people on board.
Russia so far has reported only two cases of the disease on its soil. Two Chinese nationals diagnosed with the virus and hospitalized in two different regions of Siberia in late January have recovered and have been released from hospitals.
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Yuras Karmanau reported from Minsk, Belarus. Associated Press writer Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed reporting.
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See more AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak
