Denied entry into Poland, Slovakia: Indian nationals

Thiruvananthapuram: Caught between a rock and a hard place is the situation of many Indian nationals, including Malayalis, trapped in Ukraine as they are allegedly not being allowed through at the Polish and Slovakian borders and have no place to go in view of the Russian offensive.

Turned away at the Polish and Slovakian borders, after travelling hundreds of kilometres from their respective colleges and standing in long queues for hours, prompted many students, in desperation, to resort to making video calls to media outlets to let the Indian authorities know the problems they are suffering.

Their desperate messages appear to have reached some ears too as Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan shot off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi inviting his attention to this problem.

The Kerala CM also raised the issue in his discussion with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar who, according to the CMO, assured that there are Indian officials at the borders who can deal with the problem of Indians not being allowed through. However, one set of students, who are stuck at the Slovakian border for several hours now, in their video call to a news channel said that Indians were being turned away and Ukrainian women and children were being given priority there.

The students, many of them women, claimed that the border authorities were not letting them through as they have not received any communication from the Indian Embassy about allowing Indian nationals through.

Earlier in the day, a student had shared visuals of alleged Ukrainian army personnel assaulting Indian students at the Polish border and preventing them from going through.

Subsequently, several video messages of stranded Indian students complaining about being not allowed through at the Polish borders, went viral.

In a late-night advisory on Sunday, the Indian Embassy in Warsaw said that they were arranging 10 buses to bring Indian students stranded along the Polish border at Shehyni (on the Ukraine side) to ferry them to other transit points along the border.

The Embassy said that the buses will begin their trips from Monday, February 28, and will take those stranded to a residential accommodation being arranged by the Embassy office in Rszeszow. They also listed out numbers for the students to contact to book a place on these buses, adding that the move is expected to reduce crowding at the Shehyni

crossing.