As Tuesday marked the first Indian casualty in Ukraine – Naveen Shekharappa Gyandagoudar, a 21-year-old student at the Kharkiv National Medical University who had stepped out to buy food – the other stranded students went into a state of panic, describing their situation as hellish.
Speaking to News18 from an underground shelter of a residential complex, Rupam Mondal, an MBBS student in Kharkiv, one of the worst-affected Ukranian cities, said: “Kharkiv is like hell now, and we will not survive this hell much longer. We can’t escape too. We are stuck for the past several days and are unable to move due to the incessant shelling. We have nearly run out of food and are surviving by boiling the tap water available in toilets. We don’t know for how long we can continue like this.”
Mondal narrated how several attempts to flee his bunker had to be abandoned. “The building shakes every time bombs are dropped in the neighbourhood. The nearest railway station is 10km away and we have no means of transportation. We tried to move out in the morning, but the heavy shelling forced us back in. Most of the Ukranian residents of our building have already fled. I am stuck here with five other friends from India because we couldn’t find anyone to guide us safely to the station.”
The tragedy prompted the Indian government to call the ambassadors of Russia and Ukraine to stress safe passage of the thousands of Indians still stranded in Ukraine. Sources in the Indian Embassy revealed that 3,679 Indians are stuck in Kharkiv, 238 of whom are minors.
Early satellite imageries showed a 64-kilometre-long convoy of hundreds of Russian armoured vehicles, tanks, towed artillery and other vehicles heading to the capital city, Kyiv.
Thousands were seen rushing to leave the city amid growing fears that the convoy will launch assaults to take control of Kyiv and other major cities in the country.
The Indian government, meanwhile, has reportedly negotiated for a free and peaceful airspace for Indian aircraft with its Russian counterpart to ferry the stranded nationals out of Ukraine, while also prohibiting officials of both Ukranian and Russian embassies in India to leave the country till the evacuation process is complete.
Mondal, who hails from Jhargram in West Bengal, said, “We have already chalked out our escape to the Ukraine-Hungary border, but we are unable to take the first step of reaching the station. We missed the morning train. We are not sure if we can catch the next one. We have to try again, despite knowing that outside this bunker, we are on our own and there’s no guarantee that we will be safe. We don’t have an option.”
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