After enduring a gruelling day-long journey that included a 15-kilometre trek to the border in freezing temperatures, as bombs and gunfire raged, Hitesh Chaudhary, 19, feels his escape from the war in Ukraine was a miracle.
The medical student is one of thousands from India who have returned home after Russian forces entered Ukraine on February 24.
“I feel lucky that I am back home safely. I think it is nothing short of a miracle to come out alive from that situation,” Hitesh, from Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh state, told The National.
He arrived in Delhi on Wednesday after spending days at the Ukrainian-Romanian border, but thousands of others remain trapped in Ukraine or at its borders amid allegations that the Indian government faltered in its plans to rescue citizens.
“We should have been home before the war broke out. The Indian embassy in Ukraine had a delayed response to the crisis … we did not get any help from them,” he said.
Two Indian student deaths have been confirmed so far. One was killed during shelling in the eastern city of Kharkiv and another was shot in Kyiv, the capital.
The Indian foreign ministry said on Friday that more than 20,000 Indians had left Ukraine since its first advisory was issued mid-February amid mounting fears of conflict.
New Delhi launched an evacuation mission, Operation Ganga, two days after Russia invaded Ukraine and has so far brought back about 11,000 citizens with assistance from some of Ukraine's neighbouring countries, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary.
The foreign ministry said as many as 7,000 are waiting to be flown home.
The government has sent four ministers to Ukraine's neighbours to assist in the repatriation effort but Hitesh said that he and other Indian students had to find their own way across the border.
He said the main airport in Ivano-Frankivsk, the western Ukraine city where he was studying, was hit by Russian missiles on the first day of the war.
Two days later, he and six other Indian students hired a bus to take them from their hostel to the border with Romania. After travelling all night amid air strikes and shelling, the bus dropped them off about 15 kilometres from the border because of the traffic, leaving them to walk the rest of the way with their belongings.
For Arpit Katiyar, an Indian studying medicine in the eastern city of Kharkiv, the journey to safety was even longer.
After sheltering in a metro station when fighting broke out, he left with his cousin for the Poland border in a hired bus and a shared cab.
“It was a very difficult journey. It took us three days to reach the border. We did not sleep for a minute,” Arpit, 22, told The National.
He said hundreds of students in interior regions and closer to the Russian border were still stranded in the war-hit country, and most of them have taken shelter in metro stations and underground bunkers.
Indians make up the largest group of foreign students in Ukraine, with at least 18,000, mainly medical students, studying in various universities across the country in 2020, the latest government figures show.
The stranded Indian students have been drawn into the Russian-Ukrainian propaganda war, with each side accusing the other of holding them hostage.
India has denied the hostage claims.
The students have been issuing desperate appeals to the Indian government through videos posted on social media, including about 100 trapped in the north-eastern city of Sumy.
Despite this, the government has been praising its own evacuation efforts in a public relations blitz, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party seeks to win local elections in key states.
India has historically been proactive in removing its citizens from war zones, rescuing more than 170,000 from Kuwait in 1990, and others from Libya and Yemen more recently. But the response to the Ukraine crisis has hurt this reputation.
Many members of the ruling party have accused the students of ignoring the government's advisories, with some even questioning their decision to study abroad in the first place.
Prahlad Joshi, a member of Mr Modi's government, claimed earlier this week that "90 per cent of Indians who study medicine abroad fail to clear qualifying exams in India''.
But Hitesh said the government was trying to hide its failure to relocate stranded students as well as the shortage of professional colleges in India.
More than 1.6 million students sat the qualifying exam for one of about 42,182 seats available in government medical institutions last year.
The cost of pursuing a medical degree at a private college in India ranges from 5 million to 15 million rupees ($65,000 to $200,000), whereas a six-year-course in Ukraine costs 3.4 million, including hostel accommodation.
“Nobody fails," said Hitesh, who scored 94 per cent in his 12th standard exams that are used as a basis for university admissions and eligibility for admission tests. "Studying here [in India] is difficult because of the exorbitant fees and the cut-off list.
“The minister is blaming us for their failures.”
Foreign students fleeing Ukraine complain of racism
Foreign students fleeing Ukraine say they faced racism
