The Russian Humanitarian Mission will start working in the South Caucasus in the near future, the director general of the Russian Humanitarian Mission (RHM) Yevgeny Primakov said, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza. He specified that they will focus on helping the most needy republics.
"We are constantly expanding our geography and will soon be working in Armenia and Georgia. Now we are developing several projects in the field of medical care, educational assistance and agrotechnical assistance in agriculture. All of them are being developed: first, we assess needs and logistic chains, and only after that we start implementing programs," he noted.
Yevgeny Primakov drew attention to the fact that such programs of the Russian humanitarian mission are not relevant for Azerbaijan. "The social situation in Azerbaijan is not the same as in Armenia and Georgia. Azerbaijan is not a poor country, and it is difficult to say that there are destroyed schools in the republic. The Azerbaijani authorities are doing well with it, but we would like to work there in the field of education and cultural cooperation," the director general of the RHM emphasized.
The history of the Russian humanitarian mission has started in the late 2000s. "When I was working in the Middle East in a correspondent's office, we decided that it was enough for us to report on war events, that we had to do something right with our own hands. I worked at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and we started to do the same, only under the Russian flag. We have a lot of government agencies engaged in this kind of work, for example, the Ministry for Emergency Situations and Rossotrudnichestvo. And we would like the work to be done by civil society as well," he explained the reason for the creation of the Russian Humanitarian Mission.
"It is clear that it is unlikely that anything but a bullet may stop people who are convinced that they should carry evil to others. Terrorists must be destroyed. But people who want to get out of this trap need to be given an alternative in the form of good. So our work is also directed against terrorism," Yevgeny Primakov concluded.
