New Delhi: In the ongoing evacuation drive by the Indian Government, 12 more medical students arrived in Chennai from conflict-ridden Ukraine on Sunday evening.
Earlier, a batch of five students landed in Mumbai in the first evacuation flight operated by the Central government, followed by 12 more in the second flight in the evening after a brief layover in New Delhi.
According to the Tamil Nadu government, as many as 1,100 students stranded in Ukraine have been able to establish contact with the state and sought help in returning to their homes. The government has launched two helplines – in Delhi and Chennai – to help the students feed in their details and seek help from the authorities concerned.
Meanwhile, four students, studying in a university in south-eastern Ukraine, made a fervent appeal to the government to be brought back to their homeland. With tears in their eyes, they shared their ordeal of having to take refuge in underground bunkers amid the explosions.
“We are here for the past two days. We are not able to move out of the bunker. We fear for our lives. For now, we feel we are safe but we continue to hear sounds of explosions. We don’t know how long this will continue. We appeal to our government to get us on the plane,” Deccan Herald quoted one of the girls as saying.
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Another girl pursuing her under-graduation from Zaporizhia State Medical University in south-east Ukraine said that they are 1,000km away from the border from where the stranded Indian students are being taken to Hungary, Romania and Poland, and then flown to New Delhi or Mumbai.
Notably, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began earlier this week on Thursday when several attacks were launched on the border of the nation as well as the capital city Kyiv.