Over 22000 Indians brought back from Ukraine, many students elected to stay back: S Jaishankar
Over 22,000 Indian citizens have returned home safely from war-torn Ukraine despite the challenges posed, Union External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar informed Parliament on Tuesday adding that a large number of students elected to stay back despite several advisories.
“As tensions increased, Indian Embassy in Ukraine started a registration drive for Indians in Jan 2022. As a result, around 20,000 Indians registered. Most Indian nationals were students pursuing medical studies in Ukrainian universities dispersed throughout the country,” Jaishankar said in his statement in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
Jaishankar said there was a natural reluctance to leave educational institutions. “Some universities actively discouraged & showed reluctance to offer online courses…Despite our efforts, however, a large majority of students elected to continue staying in Ukraine,” he said.
“The root causes (of conflict) are the complex going-around range of issues. We launched the most challenging evacuation exercises amid an ongoing conflict,” he added.
“Students hail from 35 states/UTs of India with over 1000 students each from Kerala, UP, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar and Rajasthan,” Jaishankar added.
The union minister also said that more than half the students were in universities in eastern Ukraine that borders Russia and has been epicentre of conflict so far.
Jaishankar said under union government’s evacuation mission ‘Operation Ganga’, 90 flights have been operated thus far out of which 76 were civilian flights and 14 were Indian Air Force flights.
“The evacuation flights were from Romania, Poland, Hungary & Slovakia. While IAF rose to the occasion, most of the pvt airlines also participated enthusiastically,” he said.
Jaishankar said the Indian government issued an advisory on February 15 advising Indian citizens in Ukraine to leave the country.
“In view of continued build-up of tensions in February, the Embassy issued an advisory on 15 February 2022, advising Indians in Ukraine whose stay isn’t essential to leave country temporarily. It also advised Indians not to travel to Ukraine or undertake non-essential movements within Ukraine,” he said.
The minister said the most challenging part of the evacuation exercise was evacuating Indian nationals from Kharkiv and Sumy. “Both the places witnessed heavy shelling and airstrike,” he said.
After a harrowing two weeks, Indian students stranded in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy finally moved towards Poltava in the central part of the country, from where they were taken in trains to Ukraine’s western border on March 8.
The evacuation from Sumy, announced by union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, was a challenging exercise given the volatile situation in the region near the Russian border. It came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and sought their support for safe and quick evacuation of Indians from Sumy.
