KYIV: According to Pakistan’s embassy in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, there were 3,000 students in Ukraine and majority of them had left the country. It said efforts were being made to evacuate 600-700 more students.

As many as 411 more Pakistanis, including 12 family members of the embassy staff, were evacuated on Sunday. There were 143 Pakistanis on the border posts and 15 at Lyiv and Ternopil reception desks. Another 101 Pakistanis were on their way to Lyiv from various other cities, including Kharkiv, Poltava and Kyiv.

The embassy claimed that nearly 90 per cent evacuation had been completed to ‘safe zone’ and the remaining would be completed in the next couple of days. The embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are actively engaging the Ukrainian government to expedite the process.

According to the statistics released by the embassy, as many as 358 Pakistanis were evacuated to Poland, 22 to Romania, six to Slovakia, three to Hungary and one Pakistani to Moldova. The statement said 21 Pakistanis had been brought back to Pakistan.

An earlier statement of the embassy said that the mission had been providing accommodation to the students in Ternopil. It said night curfew had been imposed in different cities, including Kharkiv, Lyiv, Ternopil and Kyiv.

It said that currently there was no safe place in Ukraine and even cities like Lyiv and Ternopil that were in the west of Ukraine had been hit.

“The government of Ukraine is dysfunctional, yet the embassy is making all-out efforts to facilitate evacuation of Pakistanis from the country,” said the statement.

Minister for Aviation Ghulam Sarwar Khan has said Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) was all set to launch an evacuation plan to airlift Pakistani students standard in Poland.

Speaking at a news conference in Taxila, the minister said the Pakistanis would be airlifted from Warsaw, the capital of Poland, as landing on another airport near the Poland-Ukraine border was not possible due to technical reasons. He said Pakistan had initially planned to send two special flights of Boeing-777 to Warsaw to bring back Pakistanis, mostly students.