India is setting up an embassy in the Ukrainian city Lviv after evacuating all its citizens from the capital Kyiv, India’s foreign secretary Harsh Shringla told reporters late Tuesday.
He did not say if the embassy in Kyiv would be shut.
“The Embassy office in Ukraine is being set up in Lviv, which will enable our Embassy teams to spread out to the border areas of Ukraine with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania,” Shringla said, adding that the proximity to the western border would allow the embassy to facilitate the evacuation of citizens from Ukraine into neighboring countries.
The Ministry of External Affairs declined to confirm to CNN if the Kyiv embassy had been shut.
Earlier this week, the Indian embassy in Kyiv had issued advisories for all Indian citizens to leave the capital.
“All of our nationals have left Kiev,” Shringla said Tuesday.
So far, 12,000 of the 20,000 Indian citizens that were in Ukraine have left the country. Half of those remaining, around 4,000, are in conflict zones in the Kharkiv-Sumy region of Ukraine, while the rest are “out of harm’s way,” Shringla added.
The Indian Air Force also joined aid evacuation efforts by sending a C-17 aircraft to Romania early Wednesday, state broadcaster Doordarshan News reported.