Two Odia students, stuck in Ukraine, return home
Two Odia students, stuck in Ukraine, return home
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Berhampur: While scores of Odisha students remain in Ukraine, hoping to board an Air India evacuation flight as soon as possible, D Adarsh Patra and Biswambar Badatya of Berhampur, as well as Mihir Ranjan Dalai of Puri, consider themselves fortunate.
They are all third-year medical students at Kharkiv National University who boarded a flight the day before Russia invaded Ukraine and are now back in Ukraine. In Ukraine, the three of them shared a flat.
They claim that tension has been growing for the previous month. "After the situation deteriorated, we attempted to get flights to India and were successful on February 23 from Kyiv to Doha," they explained.
"On Wednesday at 9 p.m., we boarded a flight from Kyiv to Doha airport, where we spent around 18 hours." We travelled from there to Mumbai and then to Bhubaneswar, from whence we flew to our respective hometowns. During our layover in Doha, we learned about Russia's attack," Patra (21) was cited in a news outlet as saying.
"We found out a day after we departed that Ukraine's airspace had been closed," Badatya added, recognising how fortunate they were.
According to reports, some additional students from Odisha arrived in Bhubaneswar on Sunday after boarding aircraft out of Kyiv before the Russian invasion began.
