Relieved Russians return home after fleeing Syria violence

"The Free Syrian Army is getting closer. We've been left without money, without light, without water," Natasha Yunis, who ran a beauty salon in her adopted home of Damascus after meeting her Syrian husband, said of rebel advances on the capital.

"A bomb exploded near our house ... The children hid. Of course it was horrible," said Yunis, giving her age as about 60.

Russia has been Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main protector in an uprising against his rule, but its Middle East affairs envoy was quoted as saying last month that the rebels could defeat Assad and that Moscow was preparing evacuation plans in case they were needed.

It organized two flights to evacuate 77 men, women and children from the Middle East country, where the United Nations says 60,000 people have been killed in 22 months of bloodshed. Both flights arrived in Moscow early on Wednesday.

The evacuations are the strongest signal yet that Russia may be preparing for the possibility of Assad's fall, but Moscow insists the operation is not the start of a mass exodus of tens of thousands of Russian citizens living in Syria.

Alfred Omar, 57, a resident of Syria married to a Russian woman and dressed in an jacket from Russia's Emergencies Ministry, said Moscow's policies had begun to threaten its own citizens inside the country. His lower lip trembled as he spoke.

"It's dangerous there for Russians. If the Free Syrian Army understands that a person is Russian, they'll immediately cut off their head, because they (are seen to) support Assad's regime," he said.

Moscow has protected Assad from three consecutive U.N. Security Council resolutions intended to force him out or press him to end the bloodshed.

Omar said he had left Syria because he did not want to support one side or another.

"I am a simple citizen how can I change anything," he said on arrival at Moscow's Domodedovo airport.

A spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry, which organized the flights from Beirut to Moscow, said no more flights were planned to bring Russians home. Russia has also said it has not changed its policy on Syria.

But military officials have been quoted as saying that warships in the Mediterranean Sea for naval exercises may also be used to help evacuate Russians.

Many of the Russians in Syria are women who married Syrian men over several decades, during which many families in Syria's elite sent their children to Soviet schools.

Others include employees in state companies that are still operating in Syria.

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