4 min readNew DelhiMar 3, 2022 07:18 AM IST
First published on: Mar 2, 2022 at 08:00 PM IST
“I can’t tell you about the situation here. If not the bomb, the border (conditions) will kill us,” Mansi, a third-year MBBS student, had told her mother, Harsha Singhal, a day ago in a message from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine.
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“It would have been better to die in Ivano. There were people feeling suffocated because of the crowd…they collapsed. I will go tomorrow (to cross the border). One girl suffered a fracture in her leg…I will come tomorrow,” she said.
On Wednesday, Mansi and 210 other Indian nationals stranded in Ukraine managed to cross the border into Romania and fly back to India.
Showing the message, Harsha and her husband Ramesh broke down and said they regret letting their daughter go abroad for studies. “I had booked (return) tickets for Mansi but the bombing started,” Ramesh said, waiting for his daughter to emerge from Delhi’s IGI Airport. “She was sending me videos of the attacks; she kept trying to leave. After some time, students booked a bus, which dropped them near (Ukraine’s border with) Romania. They had to walk 15-20 km and struggled to cross the border in the cold.”
Mansi said many of her friends are still stuck at the Romanian border. “We stood in lines near the border for eight to 10 hours,” she said. “There was no food, hardly any water. I wish we knew about the war situation earlier. It was better when we reached Romania. The embassy officials helped us.”
Hitesh Choudhary, a first-year MBBS student from Ivano-Frankivsk, said: “It was a struggle to get out of there (Ukraine). We were all struggling in the cold weather, waiting for help. I could see bombings near the airbase. There were so many students at the shelter. There was no space. I went to Ukraine in December (2021) and now I am back home.
“I still don’t know what happened — I can’t contact my friends there due to poor network connection.”
Students said they struggled in sub-zero temperatures and walked miles to cross the border to reach neighbouring Romania and Poland. The situation in Kyiv and Kharkiv is worse, they said.
Laxman Agarwal, an MBBS student in Lviv, said, “We were only 60-70 km from the border but the situation got out of control… The buses left us 20-30 km from the border. My friends were beaten with batons. Girls were harassed by security officials. We waited all night but had to go back to Lviv.” He said he got in touch with actor Sonu Sood’s team and managed to get out of Ukraine. “It took me a day to cross the border but now I am home.”
Union minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar, who received the students in Delhi, told them that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the government are working round the clock to bring the stranded students home safely.
Another Air India flight carrying Indians evacuated, as part of Operation Ganga, from warn-torn Ukraine landed at the Delhi airport on Tuesday (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav) 
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