A crisis that no school prepared them for – The Hindu BusinessLine

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They form almost a quarter of international students in Ukraine

The incidents that unfolded on Thursday in Ukraine have left the world dumbstruck. While the country has been in conflict with its powerful neighbour for a while now, Russian has begun a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The crisis is one that Indians cannot ignore, owing to the sizeable population of Indians who live in Ukraine. A majority of them are young students. According to the 2020 data by the Government of India, there are around 18,000 Indian students studying in various universities in Ukraine.

Foreign students

The Ukrainian government estimates that in 2019, there were 80,000 international students in the country; almost a quarter of them — 22.9 per cent — are Indians (approximately 18,320). Moroccan students form the next sizeable group of international students.

However, their proportion is less than half of that of Indian students at 10.23 per cent. Students from neighbouring Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan form another 6.8 and 6.6 per cent respectively, and 5.4 per cent of international students are Nigerians. The data also say the international student population from 158 countries is spread across around five educational institutions.

Two universities in the city of Kharkiv, in north eastern Ukraine — Kharkiv National Medical University and VN Karazin Kharkiv National University — are the most popular ones among international students. Each housed close to 5,000 non-Ukrainian students, as of 2020.

Education abroad

The number of Indian students who went abroad to study increased until 2020, according to the latest data available with the Ministry of External Affairs. While 5,88,931 Indian students went abroad to study in 2019, it was 2,61,406 in 2020 despite the pandemic. In 2021, until February 28, as many as 71,769 students went abroad to study.

Considering the escalation of the situation, the Indian Embassy has been constantly issuing advisories for Indian students. In the last message, they were asked to move to a nearby bomb shelter. Hopes of repatriating them soon shattered after Ukraine closed its airspace on Thursday.