Warriors: As the war with Russia rages, 2,300 Indian students return to Ukraine
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid outcry from their worried parents, over 23,000 Indian students returned home when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Now, a tenth of them have returned to the war-torn nation which has faced wanton destruction in the last 16 months and is short on supplies of everything.
After a series of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team succeeded in evacuating all 23,515 Indian students in the weeks after the conflict started.
After the war began, India organized nearly 90 repatriation flights operated by the Indian Air Force and private airlines under New Delhi’s Operation Ganga to bring the students back home. Some from neighboring countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan also returned with Indian students.
According to the media reports, around half of these students have since managed to get transferred to universities in other countries, like Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
But about 10 percent of the affected Indian students, around 2,300, are reported to have returned to Ukraine by April 2023, according to data collected by the Indian Embassy in Kyiv.
Nearly, one-fourth of the returnees are still taking online classes in India, while the rest have either passed or dropped out.
But the future of some, particularly medical degree aspirants from India in Ukraine, remains uncertain. Some medical students, however, managed to shift to places like Germany to complete their education.
Those who returned to Ukraine traveled through the Romania, Moldova, and Poland routes which were open until February this year. The returnees flew to one of these countries and then took the roadway to Ukraine.
But the governments stopped issuing visas soon after to avoid illegal immigration and also deter students from going back to a war zone, the media reported.
At present, India has no direct flights to Ukraine and the students’ travel from neighboring countries to Ukraine has become difficult for Indians this year.
About 100,000 students go abroad to study medicine every year, mostly to countries in the Caribbean, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the European Union, and China. The demand for medical degrees from China, however, declined over the years, thanks to tension between the two countries.
A degree from Ukraine and other neighboring countries costs Rs 25 lakh-Rs 30 lakhs, as against Rs 60 lakh to Rs 1 crore or above in India, the reason why so many students go there.
The number of Indian students in Ukraine increased from 14,958 in 2019 to 18,429 in 2020, 18,095 in 2021, and 23,515 (as of February 24, 2022).
