Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik spoke to Union Home Minister Amit Shah over telephone on Friday morning, requesting him to take urgent steps to bring back students and workers from Odisha who are stranded in Ukraine.
Shah assured Naveen that the Centre was in touch with the Ukraine government and working to bring back Indians at the earliest.
Naveen spoke to Shah a day after parents of students from Odisha made frantic appeals to the Centre and the CM to bring them back immediately.
More than 1,500 students from Odisha are caught in Ukraine’s war zones, desperately awaiting evacuation.
Mostly medical students at National Medical University in Kharkiv and Kyiv Medical University, many of them have moved into bomb shelters and safe zones since Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday.
The students had started making preparations to leave Ukraine after the West warned of an imminent attack by Russia and the Indian government asked its citizens to fly out a few days ago.
Most were hopeful of boarding flights in the first week of March. But Ukraine closed its airspace to civilian flights on Thursday, leaving them stranded.
Also read: https://odishabytes.com/watch-ukraine-parents-urge-govt-to-bring-back-stranded-odia-students/