A day after many Indian students in Ukraine were stranded at border checkpoints or hostel bunkers, confused and miserable, help is reaching them and many have reached safer locations. On Sunday, February 27, along with others, 82 students reached Kerala, hugging their families. They also shared their angst for the return of the ones still stranded in war-torn Ukraine. Angel, a student who was seen on TV talking about the ill-treatment some of them received from Ukrainian forces at the Poland border, says she and others with her have reached Poland and are safe in a hotel there.
“We are in a hotel now, in Poland. Everyone is safe here. I assume around 200 Indian students are boarding here. There is food and every other facility, no trouble here,” Angel tells TNM. Most of the 82 students who reached Kerala on Sunday stayed in the western part of Ukraine, which was relatively safe and free from attacks. “At least until our return, there has been no incident of firing or attack. But by the time I got home, I heard of attacks in other parts of western Ukraine,” says Abhirami Ajithkumar, one of the students who reached Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday.
She and other students from Chernivtsi in western Ukraine were evacuated before any signs of attack from Russian forces, and taken to the Romanian border. “So far 480 students from the Bukovinian State Medical University have come back to India in two batches. There are 700 more students to come. It took us three days of travel. We had the support of the authorities all through the journey. Ukrainian police escorted us to the Romanian border – we were only 40 kilometres away from the border. But as we were reaching the border, there was a traffic block and we were asked to walk the remaining eight kilometres, which we gladly did. At the border we waited about four hours to enter Romania. From there it was an eight-hour journey to the airport,” Abhirami says.
Their professors had accompanied them up to the Romanian border. And from Delhi, their agent, Dr Sunil Sharma, reached Romania to give them all help. “He even arranged Romanian SIM cards for us. We reached Delhi from Romania and from there, came to Kozhikode or Kochi or Thiruvananthapuram through Hyderabad or Chennai.”
Abhirami says that many other students of her university got stranded at the border for several hours since there was a lot of confusion at the border and there were thousands of students coming from different parts of Ukraine. “The Embassy had asked us to carry the Indian flag on our bus so we would be safe. But not all cars carrying Indians had the national flag. Some students also came on their own. There was some clash there. And students who came earlier were still stranded there 20 hours later – in the cold, and under snowfall. Last heard, they were given pillows and blankets and medicine. We just hope the rest can come back soon.”
Devika Rajeesh, a medical student at Mykolaiv region, in the southern coast of Ukraine, had been in tears Sunday, stuck with other students in hostel bunkers, hearing bomb blasts short distances away. On Monday, she tells TNM that buses have been arranged to take them to the border.