In the 24 hours since The Hindu spoke to her, little has changed for Sheetal, a student from Hassan who is holed up in an underground metro station in Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine. Amidst explosions and tremors she tries to go to the web portal created by the Karnataka State Disaster Management Authority (KSDMA) to collect information of those stranded in Ukraine, but is unable to access it from her phone.
She’s been stuck in the underground station for three days waiting for a word from the Indian embassy on evacuation plans. “We don’t know if we will be able to come out of this alive. There are no washrooms and we are struggling. We are all scared and don’t know what to do next,” she said.
In desperation, people have also started moving to border countries including Hungary, Romania and Poland. Ayush, a student of Lviv National Medical University, has been documenting his journey to the Polish border on Instagram. In one of his updates he said that Poland had closed its borders and was allowing only women and children to enter. He and others are taking shelter in a school. Along the 10-km distance to the border, he posted clips of Ukranian citizens providing tea and cookies to people walking in the cold towards Poland.
