By end of the day, Indian students walked 40 km to leave Kharkiv

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, March 2

Hours before the Indian Embassy in Ukraine sounded the alert to leave Kharkiv immediately, stranded students had begun their long walk to freedom.

Unable to either find trains at the Kharkiv station or board the ones available, hundreds of youngsters walked over 40 km today to reach Pesochin, from where the Indian Embassy eventually got them to safety. Pesochin is one of the three locations where the embassy had asked the stranded Indians to reach today.

Kharkiv to Pesochin on foot

• Hundreds of Indian students tread 40 km on Wednesday to reach Pesochin
• From there, they were eventually taken to safety by officials of the Indian Embassy

Arushi Jain, one of the many who undertook the long walk, sent desperate messages home to her parents in Delhi all day.

Speaking to The Tribune, Arushi’s mother Parul Jain said, “The students were told by local consultancies that they must immediately leave the bunker of the National Medical University, where they had been holed up for over eight days without food. The shelling had intensified over two days and even before the Embassy alert came, the students had taken the risk to walk 15 km to the train station in the morning. They were not allowed to board the train.”

Meanwhile, the students had to again take shelter in the train station bunker after Russian strikes escalated in Kharkiv.

Eventually, when the group of over 100 first-year MBBS students realised they were on their own without guidance or transport, they began walking towards Pesochin. By the end of the day, they had walked over 40 km.

Asked why the students did not leave the city in time, Parul Jain said the government advisory to vacate Ukraine came too late in the day.

“Even when the advisory came, it first said people in non-essential jobs should leave. What would the students think? They obviously thought medical education was essential and therefore they stayed there. By the time they woke up to the dark reality of war, the airspace had been closed,” she said.

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