‘Pushed out of train at Kyiv station’: Two Hyderabadi students narrate ordeal in Ukraine after return to city

HYDERABAD: Two Hyderabadi students, Md Samiuddin and Ghulam Ahmed Mohiuddin Salman, who returned to the city, had a horrifying experience to share as they escaped from Ukraine.
“The Indian students were roughed up and pushed out of the train when we tried to board the train at the Kyiv railway station. Why has your government adopted a neutral stand when Russia is bombarding us, was the questions we faced,” said Salman at a media conference on Tuesday.
Narrating their experience, the students said that officials of the Indian embassy could not help them much as long as they were in Ukraine.“It was only after Indians crossed the Ukrainian border that the Indian embassy extended help,” Salman said.
While Salman is pursuing medical studies in Ukraine since 2018, his friend, Samiuddin is there since 2019. They have almost completed their five-year medical course at the Uzhhorod Medical University and in a few months, they would have become doctors, had the war not broken out.
It was a fortnight long ordeal for Salman and Samiuddin before they returned home. On February 22, they left Uzhhorod as the war began. They had no time to collect even their certificates from the university as they left in a hurry for Kyiv. They had a scheduled flight on February 24 to India and they reached Kyiv airport at 5 am, but as luck would have it, there was a blast on the airport runway and all passengers were evacuated.
A government bus dropped them at the bus stop as there were no taxis plying. They found out the address of the Kyiv medical university hostel and headed there after walking for 3 km. After some questioning they were allowed inside the hostel which had some 300 Indian students. Here they stayed in the hostel basement till February 28. The ventilators and lights were switched off when shelling intensified. Indian embassy officials took them to Budapest on March 5, where they boarded an Air Asia flight to Dubai and later Hyderabad.
“Now I hope the government enrolls them in a medical college,” Salman’s father, Hakim Ghulam, said.