Peskov says Russia is listing Indians still on the battlefield to send them home

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on 8 September that Russia is compiling a list of Indian citizens still serving with its army in Ukraine and will send them home once they are identified. He spoke in a briefing aimed at Indian reporters ahead of President Vladimir Putin's visit for the BRICS summit and a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 11 September.

"The work is being done to make a list of those Indian citizens who are now on the battlefield and they will be sent back home as soon as they are determined," Peskov said. He added that Moscow is in "very deep and profound contact" with New Delhi on the file and that India has raised it more than once.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Randhir Jaiswal put the remaining number at about two dozen. "We have around two dozen people who still continue to be in the Russian Army and we have taken up the matter with the Russian government and hope to have them released at the earliest," he said. New Delhi has described many of the men as cooks, helpers and other support staff rather than combat volunteers, and has asked for all of them to be discharged.

The arithmetic sits in a Foreign Secretary briefing after Modi met Putin in Bishkek last week. Vikram Misri said India had information on 227 nationals recruited into the Russian army. Of those, 139 had been discharged. Fifty-one had died. The gap between 227 and the sum of the discharged, the dead and the "about two dozen" still serving is the part of the list that Russia now says it is trying to finish.

Recruitment of Indians into Russian units became a consular crisis in 2023 and 2024 as videos and family complaints reached Indian missions. Some men said they had been offered jobs far from the front and then issued contracts they could not exit. Others went looking for pay. The deaths, once they started to arrive as official confirmations, turned the file from a labour dispute into a political one. Each new name makes the next Modi-Putin photograph harder to explain at home.

Peskov used the same briefing to say Russia welcomes any Indian role in talks to end the war and that New Delhi's public line is close to Moscow's. He confirmed the Friday meeting will cover defence, energy and technology, including talk of Su-57 aircraft and new nuclear plants. He called proposed U.S. tariffs on buyers of Russian crude "illegal." Those files are the ones the two governments prefer to discuss. The list of Indians on the line is the one families keep asking about.

A list is not a flight. Identification on an active front is slow, and a man who signed a contract may still be treated by Russian commanders as bound by it. Peskov's wording leaves the timing with the people doing the counting. Jaiswal's wording leaves the demand where it has been for months: send the rest home.

Friday's meeting in New Delhi will produce the usual sentences on energy and defence. The test of this week's promise is narrower. If the two-dozen figure falls after the summit, the list was real. If it does not, India will be back in the same room with the same request and a larger public record of men who did not come back.