How students plotted their own escape routes out of Ukraine

Vishakha Kumari had never imagined seeing bodies on the roads, much less walk past them, to plot an escape from a warzone. The past seven days were surreal.“It was one hell of a nightmare,” said the 21-year-old medical student from Patna, as she walked into the quiet hallway of the Hindon airbase a little after 1.30am on March 3 with the first batch of Indians to be evacuated from Ukraine in the Indian Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster.“I didn’t know what shelling meant till I experienced it,” said Vishakha, who saw her quiet university town of Odessa on the Black Sea turn into a war theatre. As explosions and the crack of artillery guns inched closer, home had seemed further away.From Odessa, Vishakha and other students walked hours and eventually found a bus — on which they hung Indian flags so that they wouldn’t be attacked — to reach Moldova. From there, they got to Romania. medium90001971 Vishakha was among 798 Indians to land at the Hindon airbase from Bucharest (Romania), Budapest (Hungary) and Rzeszow (Poland) in four Globemaster aircraft. The first of the four IAF evacuation flights, from Bucharest, landed at 1.30am. The others followed in the hours after.Desperate to get out after Russia invaded on February 24, the students said they were forced to hunker down in bunkers, walk through cities to find transport, and wait at Ukraine’s borders for hours, running into days. medium89987785“We were trying to contact the embassy continuously, but every day, they were giving us different options. No one was there to help us out. We could hear blasts, firing, cries of people every now and then,” said Vishakha.Students of Odessa National Medical University weren’t initially allowed to leave on their own. But as the Russian attack on Ukraine intensified, they planned nonetheless to leave for the Siret border to enter Romania, around 470km away. But the rush of refugees and videos of people being stopped at the borders made them abandon that plan. medium89987900The students’ group began walking on February 27, three days after the Russian invasion, towards the city of Izmail on the Romanian border, 270km from Odessa.“We saw bodies on the roads, destroyed bridges and we were unsure where we would land up. Fighter planes were passing over us all the time… The ATMs were not working,” Vishakha said. Eventually, she and other students managed to hire a private bus that cost each of them around ₹17,000. “We had to hang Indian flags behind the vehicle to be safe,” she said.At the Romanian border, thousands were waiting to cross over in freezing conditions without any shelter and food. Vishakha and the others got a ferry only on March 1 across the Danube river into Romania. medium89987869For Safwan Malik (20), a medical student in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk, the war was a rude awakening. He was out celebrating a friend’s birthday a day before and woke up to the sound of a blast on February 24 (when Russia invaded), he said. “We didn’t know what to do. We started getting calls from our families, who were scared,” Malik said.Malik and three of his friends took shelter in a bunker on February 25. “We survived on bread, biscuits and chips. The grocery stores nearby were also running out of stocks. People were leaving the city to save themselves. It was total chaos,” he said.Untitled Carousel 89951023Three days later, they decided to make it to the Siret border and hired a private cab. “We were stopped at several places, but our (Indian) identity saved us,” he said. The group reached Siret on February 28 and crossed into Romania.Tushar Girigoswami (22) was at the centre of the war in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city near the Russian border that has seen the heaviest Russian attacks.“The situation was getting worse every second; there was no evacuation plan in place. We took a train to Lviv (on February 26). From there, we booked a van to reach Chop railway station and paid $500 (around ₹38,000) to reach Zahony. From there, the Indian embassy’s bus took us to Budapest,” said Girigoswami, who is from West Bengal. 89987840Simran Mewara, a 23-year-old medical student in Ukraine’s Lviv, said she spent two days stranded on the road without adequate food or shelter in the Shehyni area near Poland’s border. “The cab driver dropped us 30km away from the border. We didn’t have water or food. There were no washrooms for girls. We were left with nowhere to go as the Ukrainian army wasn’t allowing us to leave. We spent two days on the roads,” the third-year student from Rajasthan said.Unable to cross into Poland, she went back to Lviv and later took a train to the western city of Chop before escaping to Hungary.“The government is evacuating us, but that is after we reached neighbouring countries. The government should send help inside Ukraine,” said Mehak Bhatia, a student of Vinnytsia National Pirogov Medical University. The 20-year-old from Delhi travelled to Romania from the west-central town of Vinnytsia.Vishakha appealed to the government to rescue others who are still stranded. “My younger brother Kumar Raghav, who is studying at Kharkiv, is still stuck there. The last time I spoke to him was on Tuesday when he told us he had reached the Romanian border, but there has been no contact after that,” she said. medium89987799Minister of state (MoS) for defense Ajay Bhatt was at the airport to interact with those who were evacuated from Ukraine. “The IAF aircraft and private flights will operate till every single citizen has been evacuated. We have arranged for food, medicines, tent houses, clothes, blankets for people stranded,” the minister said.For the evacuated students, the war has also thrown their future — as that of Ukraine — into uncertainty. Shrishti Gupta (25) told TOI that she was in her final semester at a medical college in Donetsk, an area held by separatists for years but declared a republic by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February. “I’m unsure about my future like many others,” she said.They are worried about their Ukrainian friends too. “Over the last three years, I made several Ukrainian friends. They have been so welcoming to us and treated us like family in their country. I hope everything is resolved at the earliest,” said Nishant Chauhan, a student of Uzhgorod University.Untitled Carousel 89842764No pets left behindMore fleet-footed than her fellow passengers, Neela was among the first to get off the Globemaster at Hindon airbase. In unfamiliar terrain and climes, she was visibly restless. But Neela had the comforting presence of Yukta Thakkar, a fourth-year medical student at Lviv University who was thankful that the two of them had made it to safety, together.The Siberian Husky and three cats were among four pets airlifted in the IAF flights on March 3.Neela’s next home will be in Pune, where the weather will present a stiff adaptation challenge for the animal. Yukta said before boarding the IAF flight from Poland, she had sought clarification from the Indian authorities if she could take Neela with her to India.“Many people had given their pets to locals in Ukraine. We had purchased the husky around seven months ago and we didn’t want to leave her behind,” she said. “After the registration for the evacuation process started, we didn’t register ourselves as we wanted clarity on Neela, if we could take her along or not. (Union minister) Gen (retd) VK Singh assured us that they will let us bring Neela along, after which we initiated the registration process.” medium90000024After the evacuation process had started, the central government had relaxed rules for pets for people arriving from Ukraine after appeals by animal activists for this one-time measure.Gautam Singh said he took Grey — his cat — to a bunker while he was in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and brought his pet back with him to India from Rzeszow in Poland. “She stayed with me in the bunker. I’m very attached to her and then we crossed into Poland together. I’m happy that I was able to bring her along with me,” said Singh, a medical student at Kyiv University.Shweta, a medical student who carried her two cats along with her in the flight from Romania, said that she could not bear to abandon them in the warzone. “If I had left them behind in Ukraine, I would not have been able to forgive myself. The two cats have been really close to me and I love them,” said Shweta, a student in Odessa, southern Ukraine. She plans to move with her pets to her hometown in Kerala.Untitled Carousel 89919279