War-Weary Students Evacuated From Ukraine’s Sumy Arrive In Odisha Capital

Bhubaneswar: The Odia students, who spent 13 gruelling days before being pulled out of the embattled Ukrainian city of Sumy, are heading home. While four of them reached the Odisha capital on Friday night, one is due to arrive on Saturday.

Tapan Kumar Bugudai and Biswajit Das, both natives of Balasore, Suman Mahanta from Bhubaneswar and Smruti Ranjan Nayak from Cuttack landed in Bhubaneswar last night. Gouri Shankar Parida, also from Balasore, will soon be flying back home from New Delhi.

After reaching New Delhi on Friday, they stayed at Odisha Bhawan for some time before continuing their homeward journey.

They were evacuated from Sumy along with around 700 Indian students through humanitarian corridors on Wednesday in buses arranged by the Indian Embassy in Ukriane. The war-weary students then boarded a special train at Lviv railway station, around 70 km from the border with Poland, where they reached on Thursday.

It was a two-day journey from Sumy to the Polish border from where they were flown back home. “Besides food and water shortage, we faced problems related to hygiene in the train as it had only a few toilets,” Suman was quoted as saying by TOI.

Though exhausted, they are elated to have come out of Ukraine safely and reached home.