600 Indian nationals have left Ukraine’s north-eastern city Sumy

Russia-Ukraine war: Hindustan Times has learnt that the total number of people who were evacuated from Sumy is around 600.

Published on: Mar 8, 2022, 16:56:02 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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All Indian students numbering around 570 have been evacuated from Sumy, the northeastern Ukrainian city. Hindustan Times has learnt that the total number of people who were evacuated from Sumy is around 600. This includes a total of 580 students, 20 Indians on work permit. Besides this, 17 other nationals from Nepal, Pakistan, Tunisia and Bangladesh were also evacuated.

A total of 570 Indian students have been evacuated from Sumy (Twitter/IndiainUkraine)

Multiple small teams of Indian officials had been rushed to the eastern part of Ukraine to facilitate the Indians, mostly students who had taken shelters in campuses and bunkers. Buses and vehicles were also arranged to ferry the students. The Indian embassy in Kyiv had tweeted late on Sunday that a team of officials has been stationed in Poltava city.

The massive evacuation drive comes day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy over phone. During the conversation, Putin assured the prime minister of cooperation in the evacuation of Indians from the war-hit Sumy. The prime minister had expressed grave concerns about the safety and security of Indian students stuck in the warzones.

India carried out the evacuation process despite shelling by the Russian forces in Sumy. In fact, the government last week had urged both Russian and Ukrainian authorities for a ceasefire so that the evacuation process can be carried out without any fear.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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