Caught in Putin’s war

Julio Ribeiro

Since Vladimir Putin has hogged the limelight ever since his mighty country Russia invaded its small neighbour, Ukraine, the world’s attention has turned to the conflict in the Balkans. President Putin has requested that his ‘friendly’ overtures to his neighbour should not be called an ‘invasion’, but common observers the world over will find it difficult to oblige the Russian Strongman.

Every Indian is one with the families of the stranded students in this moment of extreme anxiety.

Putin thought that his hand of friendship would be grabbed by the Ukrainian Vladimir (spelt Volodymyr) Zelenskyy and an understanding would be reached by the two Russian-speaking people in a couple of days after Russian troops were sighted on the outskirts of Ukrainian capital Kiev! But his gamble has failed and his country’s economy is in death’s grip.

At the turn of the first millennium of the Gregorian calendar, the Russian Czar ruled the whole of Russia from his capital in Kiev. A story is told of how the inhabitants of Russia became Christians. Sitting on his throne, the Czar is said to have dispatched his emissaries to neighbouring lands to learn about the more organised religions practiced there. They reported that there was a religion called Catholicism which was presided over by the Pope, whose writ ran through all countries that followed Catholicism. The rulers of Catholic countries followed the diktats of the Pope in most things, both spiritual and temporal. The Czar rejected that religion.

The emissaries who travelled to Islamic countries reported that the most significant factor about that religion was its dietary practices that prohibited pork. Since this would revolutionise the normal eating habits of the people, this religion was also rejected.

Orthodox Christianity, where monks in each country elected their own ‘Metropolitan’, who confined himself to religious matters, won the Czar’s favour. And that is how Orthodox Christianity, which incidentally has followers in the Indian state of Kerala, was enthroned in Russia.

I am not sure if this story is true. I was tempted to tell it because of the reference to Kiev. It is a digression from the main thrust of my article which is the plight of Indian students in the war zone. Students stranded in Ukraine, thousands of them, are being evacuated via the land borders that connect Ukraine with Romania, Poland, Hungary and Moldova. Romania is where I spent four years from 1989 to 1993 as our country’s ambassador. Romanians are friendly people and have cooperated in evacuation. Many flights have left Bucharest, delivering our children safely in the arms of their parents.

Moldova is a tiny country. Most people there speak Romanian, a Romance language as distinguished from the Slavic spoken in the countries neighbouring Romania. There are Russian speakers also who were settled there after the USSR was established. The Russians can be found mainly in the Transnistria region across the Dniester river. A whole Russian army, an important strike force, was headquartered there. That strike force was used to suppress the Prague uprising that challenged Russian hegemony in 1968.

When the USSR collapsed, India assigned new envoys to these new nation states. The ambassador accredited to Romania was assigned to cover Moldova also. So, I visited this poor country a few times by car from Bucharest.

On one visit, I decided to visit the Transnistria region. The Moldovan foreign ministry, which had assigned a junior official to facilitate my visit, expressed its inability to send its officer to accompany me to Transnistria. It admitted that the region was officially a part of Moldova, but government officials of the newly formed Republic of Moldova were not welcome there. It was something like the Maoist-infested areas of Chhattisgarh, where the state’s police and revenue officials fear to enter. I went in my official car and had a bird’s-eye view of the scenario that enfolded.

I presume Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, now in the hands of ethnic Russian rebels, present a similar picture to that which I encountered 25 years ago in Moldova. The fact that there were 20,000 Indians studying medicine in Ukraine was not known to most people in India. What happens when they graduate and return to India? Is the medical degree obtained there recognised in our country? Are they permitted to practice medicine here with those degrees? Private medical education in our country is prohibitively expensive. If there is so much demand why is there no corresponding supply of avenues to meet this demand locally?

I agree that now is not the time to go into these issues. Now is the time to rescue our young boys and girls caught up in Russia’s Ukraine war. They have to be quickly evacuated before they become casualties of a war they never thought would happen. One young man from Karnataka has just lost his life in the shelling. PM Modi has correctly identified our priority and the MEA has been working overtime to get our people back. Kudos to Modi for sparing time to preside over countless meetings on the process, despite his current preoccupation of convincing the voters of Uttar Pradesh to reject the danger of the ‘lal topi’.

The Poland route has hit a bottleneck because Ukrainians wanting to exit the country know which route is the best. The confusion caused by anxious locals at the Polish border has made that route problematic. Hence, the Romanian, Moldovan and other options are preferred. Modi’s brainwave of deputing four hand-picked ministers to four countries bordering Ukraine to facilitate the evacuation must be commended. If nothing else, it will make our already hard-pressed staff at those embassies work even harder and raise the morale of the parents of the students back home.

And it is not only the closest relatives of the stranded youth whose nerves are on edge. Every countrywoman and countryman of theirs is one with them in this moment of extreme anxiety.

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