While many Indian students are left stranded in Ukraine since Russian invasion, forty students have managed to walk to the Ukraine-Poland border after they were dropped off by their college bus some 8 km from the border.
The students of a medical college in Lviv, 70 km from the border with Poland, are waiting to be evacuated from Ukraine's neighbouring countries as the Ukrainian airspace has been shut amid the Russian invasion.
Pictures shared by one of the Indian students who made the long walk to the Poland-Ukraine border show them move in a single file on the side of an empty road.
There are some 16,000 Indians in Ukraine, mostly students. Many have shared posts on social media from shelters like underground metro stations and basements amid bombings and missile attacks by Russian forces.
The External Affairs Ministry, or MEA, has opened camp offices in western Ukraine's Lviv and Chernivtsi. Most of the fighting is taking place in eastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia.
Few hours back, the Indian Embassy in Warsaw issued an urgent advisory for its citizens who desire to be evacuated via Poland. The Mission concurrently accredited to Lithuania said, "Indian nationals arriving at the Poland-Ukraine border by public conveyance i.e. by bus or taxi, are advised to make for the Shehyni-Medyka border crossing, not Krakowiec crossing." The embassy office at the Krakowiec crossings will be operational later today, headed by Shubham Kumar (Tel +48 881 551 271).
The embassy further advised Indians crossing into Poland to register their details by filling the Google Form (https:117orms.gle/TPmtUeMh98Q4XgvP9) for processing their requests for seats in the repatriation flights.
The first batch of Indian students has now left Chernivtsi for the Ukraine/Romania border.
Earlier on Thursday, with Ukraine closing its airspace after Russia launched a military operation against it, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had sent teams to the land borders with Ukraine in Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic and Romania to assist the evacuation of Indian nationals.
