The 700 Indians stranded in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy managed to leave the area — where 21 people were killed in airstrikes overnight — on Tuesday, taking advantage of a temporary ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

Escorted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Indians left their hostels in Sumy in a convoy of buses around noon and headed for Poltava city in central Ukraine en route to the western part of the country from where they will exit to one of the bordering countries for evacuation to India.

The first indication of a breakthrough was revealed by housing and urban development minister Hardeep Singh Puri in the afternoon at a departmental media conference. The official confirmation of the students managing to leave the active conflict zone came in the evening.

External affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi tweeted: “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.”

Footage released by the Ukrainians showed students crammed into buses, which are difficult to get under the circumstances, more so because drivers are reluctant to go into Sumy, which is one of the first cities to be bombarded by Russia.

Even while these students were moving out of Sumy after a 13-day ordeal, the Indian embassy in Ukraine issued an advisory urging all Indians who may have not registered with the mission earlier to make use of the opportunity offered by the humanitarian corridor and evacuate using any mode of transportation during the 10-hour window between 10am and 8pm Ukrainian time. The mission pointed out that the establishment of the next humanitarian corridor was uncertain.

This was the third humanitarian corridor to be announced since Saturday but this is the first time that the temporary ceasefire in the specific areas has held. A similar corridor had been announced on Monday and the students were boarding buses when the plan to evacuate them from their hostels was aborted as the ceasefire did not hold in some of the channels announced by the Russians.

The embassy evacuated 52 Indian sailors stranded at the Mykolaiv port along with two Lebanese and three Syrian sailors. According to the mission, route constraints prevented the evacuation of the 23 remaining Indian sailors and efforts are on to bring them out.

On Monday, at the United Nations in New York, India’s permanent representative T.S. Tirumurti had lamented that “despite our repeated urgings to both sides, the safe corridor for our students stranded in Sumy did not materialise”.

He was articulating the disappointment India felt at being unable to get the students out earlier in the day despite arranging buses for them.