08 February, Bengaluru:
Indian students are being evacuated from Sumy, Ukraine on Tuesday (India time). As many as 700 students moved out from three hostels of Sumy State University, Sumy.
Other than Indians, there are students of other nationalities as well being evacuated.
The evacuation has been organized by the Red Cross, according to a tweet by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (verified). The students had been very tense since they had been told twice that they would be evacuated but, on both occasions, the evacuation did not take place.
On Monday, they thought they would be evacuated but it did not happen as Russia announced a ceasefire the same morning. The students had already boarded a bus to Poltava in central Ukraine when the ceasefire was vetoed by Ukraine, and they were sent back to their hostels. The students have been living in the hostels for the past 13 days. They had been facing shortages of food and electricity in the last five days.
G.Siyona, from Tamil Nadu, who was one among the 700 students who were evacuated, said, “We have nothing now. Our co-ordinator gave us some rice and we are using snow as water.”
Earlier, last week, some Indian students arranged to get buses themselves.
Ayush Patil, an Indian medical student who was in studying in Ukraine, and reached home to Mumbai on March 3, said, “We organized the buses ourselves to reach Romania from Ivano-Frankivsk.”
When asked about Red Cross arranging buses for Indian students’ travel in Ukraine, an official from the Ukrainian Embassy in India did not reply.
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