Russia-Ukraine war updates: All 694 Indian students stranded in Ukraine's Sumy have left for Poltava, says Hardeep Puri

Russia-Ukraine war LATEST Updates: Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday said that all 694 Indian students stranded in Ukraine’s Sumy have left for Poltava today.

 Ukraine’s foreign ministry claims that 12,000 Russian personnel have been killed since the Russian invasion began on February 24.

Buses packed with people fleeing the Russian invasion in Ukraine began a procession along a snowy road out of one city Tuesday, as a new effort to evacuate civilians along safe corridors finally got underway.

“We call on Russia to uphold its ceasefire commitment, to refrain from activities that endanger the lives of people and to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid,” the Ukrainian ministry said.

The head of the UN’s refugee agency said Tuesday he expected the number of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine to top two million in the next two days. “I do think that we will pass the 2 million mark today or maybe at the latest tomorrow. So it doesn’t stop,” Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters in Oslo.

Civilians will start leaving the besieged Ukrainian city of Sumy Tuesday under an agreement with Russia on the establishment of a “humanitarian corridor”, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

At least nine people, including two children, have died in an air strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, some 350 kilometres east of Kiev, the rescue services said Tuesday.

Japanese automaker Nissan is planning to halt production at its plant in Russia because of “logistical challenges.”

Russia is the most  sanctioned country  in the world, according to sanctions watchlist site Castellum.ai.

The mayor of Lviv said the city in far western Ukraine is struggling to feed and house the tens of thousands of people who have fled here from war-torn regions of the country.

Russian aircraft bombed cities in eastern and central Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian officials said. Shelling pounded suburbs of the capital, Kyiv

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky shared a video on Instagram, showing himself working from his Presidential Office in Kyiv. “I’m not hiding, and I’m not afraid of anyone,” he said in a 9-minute long self-recorded video.

India, which has managed to safely bring back over 20,000 of its nationals from Ukraine amid the ongoing war, said it is deeply concerned that despite its repeated urgings to both Russia and Ukraine, the safe corridor for Indian students stranded in eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy did not materialise.

Russia is recruiting Syrians and other foreign fighters as it ramps up its assault on Ukraine, the Pentagon said Monday.

Moscow entered the Syrian civil war in 2015 on the side of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the country has been mired in a conflict marked by urban combat for more than a decade.

The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine deepened Monday as Russian forces intensified their shelling and food, water, heat and medicine grew increasingly scarce, in what the country condemned as a medieval-style siege by Moscow to batter it into submission.

A third round of talks between the two sides ended with a top Ukrainian official saying there had been minor, unspecified progress toward establishing safe corridors that would allow civilians to escape the fighting. Russia’s chief negotiator said he expects those corridors to start operating Tuesday.

But that remained to be seen, given the failure of previous attempts to lead civilians to safety amid the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.

Well into the second week of the invasion, with Russian troops making significant advances in southern Ukraine but stalled in some other regions, a top U.S. official said multiple countries were discussing whether to provide the warplanes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pleading for.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces continued to pummel cities with rockets, and fierce fighting raged in places. In the face of the bombardments, Zelenskky said Ukrainian forces were showing unprecedented courage.

“The problem is that for one soldier of Ukraine, we have 10 Russian soldiers, and for one Ukrainian tank, we have 50 Russian tanks,” Zelenskky told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday night. He noted that the gap in forces was diminishing and that even if Russian forces “come into all our cities,” they will be met with an insurgency.

In one of the most desperate cities, the encircled southern port of Mariupol, an estimated 200,000 people — nearly half the population of 430,000 — were hoping to flee, and Red Cross officials waited to hear when a corridor would be established.

The city is short on water, food and power, and cellphone networks are down. Stores have been looted as residents search for essential goods.

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