All night, as Russian forces advanced into Ukraine, a small group of Indian medical students in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv hid in a dark basement under their building, listening to a barrage of explosions.
The bombing was unabated in the morning – follow the special coverage of the CNN. “Right now, all we can hear is the sound of bombs,” Lakshmi Devi, 21, a third-year student at Kharkiv National Medical University, told Reuters by phone on Friday. “We can’t even count how many.”
Devi is among tens of thousands of foreign students arrested in Ukraine in the biggest attack on a European state since World War II.
Some 18,000 Indian students make up the largest group of the nearly 76,000 foreigners studying in Ukraine, mostly in medical courses, according to official estimates. Thousands of African students are also stranded in the former Soviet Republic.
At Ternopil National Medical University in western Ukraine, fifth-year medical student Pushpak Swarnakar was among nearly 2,000 other Indians, he said, sheltered in bunkers.
Fear of being hit in the fighting, long traffic jams and bad weather made students reluctant to heed the Indian government’s suggestion to make their own arrangements to reach the border with Poland, Romania or Slovakia, he said.
“We have stocked up on food and water for at least a week,” said Swarnakar, 25, after local authorities warned of disruptions to power, gas and water supplies.
In India, parents and families, state governments and opposition parties have called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take immediate steps to ensure the safe return of students.
The Modi government says it is trying to rescue the students. Teams of Indian Foreign Ministry officials were deployed to Ukraine’s borders with Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Romania to help fleeing Indian citizens.
Hungary said it would open a humanitarian corridor for citizens of countries like Iran or India, letting them enter without a visa and taking them to the nearest airport in Debrecen.
But from their damp bunker in eastern Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city near the Russian border, Devi and a classmate said they had no means of traveling more than 1,000 kilometers toward the western borders. “For us, it’s impossible,” said Nandan GB, also a third-year student in Kharkiv.
India’s Foreign Ministry has so far not responded to Reuters questions about concerns raised by students. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said he spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart on Friday and thanked him for supporting the return of the students.
In Kharkiv, the city’s mayor told residents to take shelter after more explosions. For now, students said they would keep relatively safely in the bunker despite the lack of heating as temperatures dropped below freezing.
Food and water were running low, and the nine were left with some fruit and cookies, they said. “We just want to go home,” Devi said.
(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar; collaboration by Jatindra Dash and Rupak De Chowdhuri; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
Source: CNN Brasil
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