Indian embassy says three crew from the Royad Mammadov are safe, one in a Romanian hospital

India's embassy in Bucharest said on Monday night that all three Indian nationals from the cargo ship Royad Mammadov were safe, that officials had spoken to them, and that one was injured and in hospital in Romania. The embassy said it was in contact with the hospital and was giving the crew whatever support it could. The ship, Saint Kitts and Nevis-flagged and Turkish-owned, was carrying corn from Izmail in Ukraine to Ravenna in Italy when it caught fire about 30 nautical miles south of Sfantu Gheorghe, outside Romanian territorial waters, and later sank.

Romania rescued eleven people, a mix of Azerbaijani and Indian nationals, and reported two dead. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said two Russian drones hit the vessel in neutral waters, that the captain was killed, and that the fate of one other person was still being established. A vessel-tracking note cited by The Week said the captain was injured rather than among the dead. Those two accounts have not been reconciled in public. The Indian statement does not name the injured sailor and does not say whether any Indian is among the dead. It says the three Indians are safe.

What the embassy can and cannot certify

An embassy that has spoken to three nationals can certify their condition. It cannot certify the flag state's casualty list, the coastal state's rescue count, or the attribution of the strike. Bucharest owns the rescue. Kyiv owns the claim that the weapon was a Russian drone. The Indian line is narrower, and it is the line families in India can use tonight: three accounted for, one in a hospital, none missing on the embassy's count. The ministry in Delhi passed the same preliminary picture, two foreign casualties, injured crew in Romania, three Indians on board, before the embassy tightened it to "all three safe".

The injured sailor's hospital is the practical file. Consular access, a medical update, and a decision on whether he can fly are the next steps the embassy has already said it is taking. The other two, uninjured on the embassy's wording, still need papers. A sinking outside territorial waters, under a Saint Kitts and Nevis flag, with a Turkish owner, leaves the crew's repatriation dependent on the owner, the flag, and the coastal state that landed them. India is a fourth desk in that chain, present because three of the names are Indian.

A corn cargo and a neutral-water claim

Zelenskyy described the cargo as corn and the owner as Turkish, and he placed the strike in neutral waters. That placement is what turns a coastal rescue into a shipping argument. A drone hit inside territorial waters is a coastal state's incident. A hit 30 miles off Sfantu Gheorghe, as Bucharest sited it, sits in the band where Ukraine, Russia and the insurer will argue over route, warning and responsibility. The ship was bound for Ravenna. Corn from Izmail to an Italian port is the commercial grain trade that has kept using the Black Sea through the war, under changing corridor rules. One sunk ship does not close that trade. It does change the premium and the crew's willingness to take the next Izmail loading.

Indian seafarers are a large share of the crews on exactly these ships. Three on one corn carrier is an ordinary manning fact, which is why a single sinking produces an embassy statement in Bucharest rather than a rare consular event. The open items are the names, the hospital, and the mismatch between Zelenskyy's account of the captain and the tracking note that has the captain injured. Until Bucharest or the owner publishes a crew list with conditions, the Indian count of three safe stands beside a Romanian count of two dead and a Ukrainian count of a captain killed and one person unaccounted for. Those numbers can all be true if the dead and the missing are not Indian. They cannot all be true if one of them is.