A second Air India evacuation flight landed at the Delhi airport early on Sunday carrying 250 Indian citizens who were stranded in Ukraine. The flight took off from the Romanian capital of Bucharest.

India is evacuating its citizens through countries neighbouring Ukraine after Kyiv closed down its airspace for civilian aircraft following the Russia offensive. On Saturday, Air India’s first flight from Bucharest carrying 219 Indians had landed in Mumbai.

Over 470 Indians had reached Bucharest on Friday through land route.

Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia welcomed the passengers at the Delhi airport.

Air India’s third such flight carrying 240 citizens has also departed from the Hungarian capital of Budapest, reported ANI.

On February 24, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla had said that about 16,000 Indians were stuck in Ukraine. Most of these stranded citizens are medical students.

Amid the scramble to evacuate Indians from Ukraine, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged the private sector on Saturday to invest in the field of medical education.

“Our children are going to small countries for study, especially in medical education,” he had said at a webinar. “Language is a problem there. They are still going...”

He had then urged the private enterprises to “enter the field in a big way” and asked state governments to frame land allotment policies aligned to their needs.

Earlier on Saturday, the Indian embassy in Kyiv had said that citizens in Ukraine should avoid going to border posts without coordinating with Indian government officials. The embassy said that it was getting increasingly difficult for the officials to help Indians who were reaching border help desks without prior intimation.

Read today’s latest developments in Ukraine here