IAF places IL-76 on standby for students evacuation from Moscow

According to the south block officials, at least two IL 76 planes will fly out to Moscow later tonight or tomorrow as soon as the students are carted to the Russian capital

Published on: Mar 3, 2022, 19:28:51 IST

By Shishir Gupta

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

The Indian Air Force has placed its Russian IL 76 strategic lift planes on standby to evacuate Indian students, stranded in Kharkiv and Sumy warzone, from Moscow. The students numbering around 4,000 are trapped in the northeast war zone and are being evacuated with the fullest support of Ukraine and Russian authorities, who are providing safe passage to the stranded Indians.

The Russian IL-76 strategic lift planes are on standby

According to the south block officials, at least two IL 76 planes will fly out to Moscow later tonight or tomorrow as soon as the students are carted to the Russian capital.

An Indian team of MEA officials are awaiting evacuation through eastern borders for the past week at the Russian city of Belgorod which is within two hours road distance from Kharkiv and Sumy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Russian president Vladimir Putin on Wednesday night to discuss the evacuation of the Indian students stuck in the Ukraine warzone. He also had a conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. External Affairs minister S Jaishankar held talks with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts.

On the western front, the Indian government has brought back more than 6,200 Indian nationals from the war-hit country. Out of these, at least 2,185 Indian nationals are coming today in 10 flights.

Loading PDF...

A senior government official said that at least 13,800 Indian nationals will be brought home on commercial flights and another 1,500 on IAF flights. This means at least 15,000 Indians will be back home by March 5.

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

Russia Ukraine Crisis

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.