‘Be safe…strong’: Indian embassy says students pulled out of Sumy may board evacuation flight tomorrow

As many as 600 Indian students were taken out of Sumy on Tuesday via the first prominent humanitarian corridor established between Russia and Ukraine at their second round of negotiation talks held last week.

The Indian embassy in Ukraine in its latest advisory on Wednesday said that 600 students who were taken out of Sumy the day before are expected to board an evacuation flight to be flown back to India on Thursday. The students earlier in the day boarded a special train en route to Lviv in western Ukraine, and from there they will make their onward journey to Poland. After reaching Poland, the they will be flown back to India on an evacuation flight under ‘Operation Ganga’.

As many as 600 Indian students were taken out of Ukraine's eastern city Sumy amid the Russian invasion on Tuesday. (India in Ukraine/Twitter)

“Be safe, be strong,” the embassy wrote in the post on the micro-blogging site.

Sumy has been impacted heavily in the last few days with missile strikes following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which entered its 14th day on Wednesday.

The Indian students were pulled out of the city on Tuesday via the first prominent humanitarian corridor established between Russia and Ukraine at their second round of negotiation talks held last week. The final green light to allow the students to leave Sumy came at around midnight Ukrainian time (3.30am IST) after which Indian officials present in the eastern city facilitated the same, Hindustan Times reported.

Meanwhile, India has so far evacuated around 18,000 of its nationals from Ukraine by special flights. In a statement released on Tuesday, the civil aviation ministry said that the Indian Air Force (IAF) - that was roped in to the Operation Ganga after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call, had brought as many as 2,467 stranded Indians back to the country, and carried more than 32-tonne relief material for the strife-torn Ukraine.

India started Operation Ganga - the mission to evacuate stranded nationals from Ukraine, on February 22. It was fulfilled via land routes in Ukraine's neighbouring countries - Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Moldova, after the east-European country closed down its airspace due to the Russian invasion.