I am on a crossing point to Romania called Portable. Around one thousand Indian nationals are stuck here, not allowed to get in. Even after eight hours, there are over 1,400 cars lined up on an 8-kilometre stretch near the border crossing, unable to move at all. There is supposed to be a coordination person for Indian citizens at the border, but there is none on the ground. The crossing process is a mess and border guards are tired and shooting in the air to push people back”.
This is the text of an SOS message to my Indian friend, himself an aid worker who until recently was resident in Ukraine but has since fled to safety crossing with his wife and two children via the Ukrainian land border on the Polish side. The sender implored this friend to petition the Indian embassy guys in Romania to have a person at the border crossing liaise with the authorities and try and help decongest the Porubne border in Romania.
Fear and panic reign across major parts of Ukraine today. Weeks of escalating tensions in eastern Ukraine have since given way to incursions by Russia into the capital Kyiv and multiple other cities in the country, forcing people to flee their homes in search of safe shelters and subways to hide.
Major cities, like Chernihiv (north), Kharkiv (north-east), Kherson (south), Mariupol (south-east), Mykolaiv (south), Odesa (south-west), Sumy (north), among other major cities in northern, eastern and southern parts of the country, are in the line of fire, while the pre-existing hostilities in Donetsk and Luhanska oblasts have significantly intensified.
Even as the European Union Aviation Safety Agency recommended extreme caution in airspace within 185 km of both the Belarus-Ukraine and Russia-Ukraine borders, by late Sunday, February 27, over 900 stranded Indians were safely brought home in four evacuation flights through Ukraine’s land border crossings with Romania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. India has named the evacuation mission ‘Operation Ganga.’
The first evacuation flight carrying 219 Indians from Bucharest landed in Mumbai on the evening of February 26, within two days of the start of the conflict. The second flight with 250 nationals arrived in Delhi in the early hours of February 27. The third Air India flight with around 240 Indians left for Delhi from the Hungarian capital Budapest.
The ongoing conflict has already extracted severe human costs, causing a growing number of civilian casualties, interrupting livelihoods and damaging critical civilian infrastructure, including hundreds of homes, water and sanitation infrastructure, schools and health facilities.
Counting casualties in conflict is always a tricky business. For one, with conditions grim, many international organisations that normally monitor civilian costs in conflicts – and violations of international humanitarian law — have left the country entirely.
The social media is littered with images and videos of burning apartment buildings, pedestrians and cyclists nursing wounds from incoming fire and hapless civilians picking shards of shattered window glass at their homes, fear and patriotic fervour writ large on their faces.
According to one estimate, nearly 85 per cent of casualties have been recorded in Government-controlled areas that have been the target of the aerial and ground attacks.
The United Nations has reported that significant infrastructural damage has left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity or water, while bridges and roads damaged by shelling have left communities cut off from markets for food and other basic supplies.
The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said the most pressing humanitarian needs are emergency medical services, critical medicines, health supplies and equipment, safe water for drinking and hygiene, and shelter and protection for those displaced from their homes.
As the conflict intensified in recent days, people began to flee the capital – home to nearly three million people– and other conflict-affected areas of Ukraine, internally displacing more than 160,000 people and pushing more than 116,000 to move across borders to neighbouring European countries, including Poland – where border authorities say some 100,000 people have arrived in recent days – Moldova and Romania.
While the scale and scope of displacement will only likely become apparent in the coming days and weeks, Ukrainian authorities estimate as many as five million people could flee the country, triggering a refugee crisis that will test response capacities in neighbouring countries.
The current situation is exacerbating an already dire humanitarian situation in the Donbas region and generating new humanitarian needs across the country. Even before the current deterioration in the situation, the prolonged conflict in Ukraine had led to more than 3,000 deaths and more than 7,000 injured, while damaging or destroying approximately 55,000 homes. Around 2.9 million people already required humanitarian assistance, a figure that is expected to rise exponentially as a result of the intensification of armed conflict.
Another day in the life of international conflicts! As nations tug and pull for expansionism on the one side and security and sovereignty on the other, for the millions of Ukrainian children, women, old, infirm and vulnerable citizens caught slambang in the middle of a maelstrom of someone else’s making, there cannot be a more pressing priority than putting a swift and permanent end to the conflict in their beautiful country.
What if we didn’t… catch that last flight?
A FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT
Viktor Frankl, after spending a very long and arduous time at Auschwitz, concluded that all things considered, the difference between those that survived and those that didn’t, was whether they had something to look forward to or not – a promise to keep, a project to accomplish, a person to meet.
He was wrong. It is just kismet or luck. I say this not lightly as I crossed over to Poland just three days ago from Ukraine and I write this while visiting Buchenwald and Auschwitz camps near Krakow.
My family and I have called Kyiv our home for the last six years. While the drumbeats of war were getting ever shriller, we didn’t truly believe it will happen. So on Wednesday night, February 23, at my wife’s insistence, we decided to just take a week off as kids were off for Spring break, and get on a flight to Poland. Little did we know that these were the last flights out of Kyiv.
The night we left was the last night the airport and airspace were still open. Our flight took off at 7 pm and reached Poland a bit before 9 pm. Less than nine hours later, at 5 am, Putin declared full-scale bombing of Kyiv.
We left with one suitcase and a full home left behind with piano and paintings and all our life goods for the last six years. Our friends, our children’s friends and nanny, our school, work, colleagues, all seem, in a matter of just 72+ hours, a lifetime away, and out of grasp.
When I think back, our ride to the airport was eerily quiet and the airport queues of Indian students on the evacuation flights snaked on forever. Our flight to Warsaw was also full. All this feels like it was luck—for we could have also made our reservations for the day after and we’d have almost no way to come out with our small kids.
As I see my dearest Ukrainian friends struggling with keeping kids safe, I catch myself staring at my six-year-old and wonder what if we didn’t…catch that last flight out of Kyiv?
On the record
#OperationGanga developments. Six flights have now departed for India in the last 24 hours. Includes the first flights from Poland. Carried back 1377 more Indian nationals from Ukraine.
The guns are talking now, but the path of dialogue must always remain open. I welcome & encourage all peaceful efforts to end the bloodshed in Ukraine & halt this conflict. I thank the countries that have offered to host negotiations. The @UN is ready to support such efforts
PM@narendramodi chaired a high level meet,his second today,to review the ongoing efforts under #OperationGanga to bring back
Indians stranded in Ukraine. PM said that the entire government machinery is working round the clock to ensure that all Indians there are safe & secure. Arindam Bagchi@MEAIndia •Feb 27A dedicated Twitter handle has been set up to assist in the evacuation of Indians from
Ukraine OpGanga Helpline. Please direct all related queries to @opganga.
