After undertaking very successful evacuation in Ukraine, Operation Ganga to slow down

New Delhi, Mar 10: After a successful evacuation out of Sumy in Ukraine, the last of the planned flights to bring Indians back will depart today. With a large number of Indian nationals being pulled out of Ukraine, India has begun slowing down the evacuation efforts.

India undertook a massive operation to evacuate its nationals and in the days to come Operation Ganga may not be on the same scale as the goal has been reached. However some Indians still remain in very small numbers in remote pockets of Ukraine. Some of them have expressed that they would not want to leave as they have their roosts in Ukraine.

By Thursday, most of the staff in the Indian embassy will be pulled out of Kyiv. These officials would operate from Lviv where the Indian mission has already been established. India would continue to assess as to how long its staff remain in Ukraine. It is an evolving situation and a decision on whether to pull them out completely from Ukraine would be taken depending on how things shape out, an official tells OneIndia.

The most challenging of all the operations was at Sumy, where some 700 Indians were stuck. The journey for the 700 students was not an easy one. They travelled around 175 kilometres in buses and reached Poltava, which has has not been affected by the ongoing conflict.

The students then took trains to the western borders of Ukraine and then crossed over into the neighbouring countries. "Happy to inform that we have been able to move out all Indian students from Sumy. They are currently en route to Poltava, from where they will board trains to western Ukraine.

Flights under #OperationGanga are being prepared to bring them home," ," Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a tweet.

India was able to evacuate the students after Russia agreed to a ceasefire on Tuesday to facilitate the creation of a humanitarian corridor. The evacuation for India was not easy and on Monday, it had to abort an attempt to pull out its nationals from Sumy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi dialled both Russian and Ukrainian Presidents, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He conveyed in detail to both the leaders about India's concerns for the safety of its nationals.

This was followed by a call by Foreign Secretary, Harsh Shringla to his counterparts in Ukraine and Russia. During the calls it was finally agreed to have a cease-fire and create humanitarian corridors to ensure the safety of citizens.

In addition to this, the diplomats of India's Permanent Mission to the United States stayed in touch with the International Committee of Red Cross. They in turn reached out to their volunteers in Ukraine who helped in the evacuation of Indians and other nationals out of Sumy.