Prior to being rescued by the Non-Resident Nepalese Association (NRNA) from Poland on 8th March, the students had spoken to SBS Nepali about their plight and issued a plea to be saved while they were in Ukraine.
Nepali students Kamal Pokhrel, Rajan K.C., Parsuram Dami, Kishor Pokhrel, Arun Pokhrel and Dipak Singh Sunar had arrived in Ukraine on student visas just 15 to 20 days before Russia’s invasion on 24 February.
As bombs rained down on the country, the students say their thoughts turned to the possibility of starvation as they started running out of food.
Spending their days shuttling back and forth between a safety shelter and their university’s hostel, sleep was at a minimum.
“We watch YouTube and news during the day. When there are bombings, we are taken down to the bunker, then again back to our room,” said Kamal Pokhrel during his conversation with SBS Nepali in early March.
Initially, the hostel was providing us with food, but not anymore. We have been putting our lives at risk to go out and get food while there are armies patrolling and bombings nearby.
He said the soup provided to them was not filling enough compared to the Nepali diet they were used to, and they also could not eat beef for religious reasons.
“There is the obvious fear of dying from bombings, but we are at a stage where we fear death by hunger.”
With markets running out of stock and their pockets running out of money, Pokhrel said the situation was worsening and “help” seemed to be out of sight.
After contacting the Nepali Embassy based in Berlin, Germany (as there is no Nepali Embassy in Ukraine), they got their first and only response.
“They said - ‘stay safe, it is difficult here too’ - and we did not get any response after that,” said Pokhrel.
NRNA members from Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary asked them to come to the border as they are not allowed into the war zone, he said.
Listen to our conversation with Pokhrel during his stay at the university: Nepali students stuck at Ukrainian university finally rescued
“We had big hopes of getting some help from related organisations. We called everyone and they say, ‘come to the border’,” said Pokhrel.
“Going to Kharkiv could be an option as they have trains running from there – but we do not have any transportation to get there, and everything is at a halt.”
He said that from their university’s location, Kharkiv is more than 200 kilometres away, and the border around 1,400 kilometres.
Their only hope, then, was a rescue team.
“If the Nepal Government or any organisation could arrange transportation from Staroblisk to Kharkiv, it would be a great help. From Kharkiv there are 3-4 trains running daily to Lviv, which is near to Poland border,” said Pokhrel.
According to him, an Indian team had rescued a group of Indian students from Luhansk in early March, a city around 1,500 kilometers from the border.
The Nepali students had thought of joining them but could not get in touch, he said.
Luhansk was among the first cities attacked by Russia.
Pokhrel said they were unprepared for the attack as they had not been informed about the threat of war by their university.
“We had asked and said we will go back if a war is about to start. But they did not tell us about it – the local people here obviously know the news, like when the war might start and all,” he said.
I have also had arguments about this with them. Maybe if they had told us in the initial days, we would not have been in this situation right now.
