Braving fierce shelling, 130 Indian medical students including over 20 Doha-based students in Ukraine’s Kharkiv university are preparing to travel to Lviv, a city in western Ukraine around 70km from the border with Poland.
However, a parent of a Doha-based student said that the students were stuck at the Kharkiv railway station bunker as bombing continues in the city. She said the hotel bunker in which they were staying for the last several days has also been destroyed.
Over a thousand students had been stranded at the railway station amid heavy shelling of the city since morning. The Indian Embassy in Ukraine issued two advisories yesterday, with the first asking its citizens to leave Kharkiv by 6pm local time (7pm Qatar time), and then a second which asked them to leave the city immediately.
The group of students, who have been staying in bunkers for the last six nights, were given instructions to reach the railway station through metro tunnels.
But heavy shelling that destroyed buildings over the tunnel overnight made the movement difficult. The students were then transported to the railway station in batches and this operation also halted after the shelling resumed. It was also impossible to move to the nearest railway station as a curfew is in place from 4pm, and there are shoot-on-sight orders by the Ukrainian forces.
It is not clear when all 130-plus students will converge at the railway station before boarding a train to Lviv.
Doha resident Ayisha Saibool, mother of Dua Khadeeja, a first-year medical student at the V N Karazin Kharkiv National University in Kharkiv, told The Peninsula that Makeway Private Limited, the agency which is overseeing the students’ evacuation, has taken the risk to move the students from the bunkers as practically there are no areas left in Kharkiv where an artillery shell has not yet hit.
She said her daughter had informed her in a message last morning that they were forced to flee after Russian paratroopers landed in Ukraine’s second largest city on the seventh day of the full-scale invasion and news spreading that they started searching for Ukrainians in hostels and even in bunkers.
Another Doha-based parent Nusrath Shamseer said her daughter, Fathima Sharbeen has reached the railway station with her colleagues, and that they have been waiting for the other students before getting into the train to Lviv. The journey towards the border town of Lviv which lies over 1,000km from Kharkiv will take an average time of 13 hours.
After reaching Lviv they hope to cross the border to Poland or Hungary to board any evacuation flight sent by the Indian government. The Indian embassy in Poland and Lithuania has urged students in Lviv to move towards Poland or Hungary so that external affairs ministry officers can help arrange their return back home.
There’s been no evacuation from Kharkiv officially by the Indian embassy even after a student from the southern state of Karnataka died from shelling on Tuesday. Naveen Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, a fourth year medical student, had stepped out to buy groceries when a missile struck the regional administration building in Kharkiv, close to where he was at the time, killing him on the spot.