Foreign Students Fleeing Ukraine Battle Racism, Extortion

With the sound of shelling over overhead, Nigerian medical student John Adebisi has been trapped for nine days in a basement in the north-east Ukrainian town of Sumy, wracked by fear and without enough money or means to escape.

More than 1 million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russian troops invaded on Feb. 24, but many more are stuck, particularly foreign students whose governments and families lack planes, cash or connections to get them out.

Racism makes it harder to flee, several students said, after watching social media videos of African, Asian and Middle Eastern travelers being assaulted by border guards and turned away from buses and trains while white people were let through.

"In terms of evacuation, we need a lot of money to pay for things because people are trying to extort us," Adebisi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that money transfer apps were not working and their cards had reached their withdrawal limits.

"Some students were charged up to $600 to get to the west of Ukraine ... we have heard there is racism at the borders, which is something we experienced even before the fighting broke out. Black students are treated differently," the 27-year-old said.

Thousands are estimated to have died in the biggest attack on a European state since 1945, which has led to a barrage of economic measures against Russia, and stoked fears of wider conflict in the West.

Ukraine's foreign ministry said on Twitter that there is no discrimination in crossing the border and a "first come first served approach applies to all nationalities".

But Tanmay, who is Indian, said Ukrainian guards abused his brother as he tried to leave Ukraine.

"A guard near the Polish border shoved my brother and tossed away his suitcase, yelling and screaming at him and his (friends) to go away," Tanmay said in interview from Delhi.

"My brother said ... the Ukrainian guards allow (white) people to go through ... The message was, 'If you're not white, your life doesn't matter'," said Tanmay, 24, who asked not to share his brother's name for his safety.

'No authorities'

Ukraine has been popular with foreign students who want a relatively cheap education overseas. Government data shows 76,000 students from 155 nations were enrolled in Ukrainian universities.

After an Indian student was killed by shelling on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussed the evacuation of his citizens with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Other nationals are less fortunate.

Syrian Orwa Staif was studying in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second biggest city, where bombing has left its center a wasteland of ruined buildings and debris.

Staif said he had to bribe the cashier to get him and three friends onto a train to the western city of Lviv, close to the Polish border.

The 24-year-old software engineering student said he hopes to travel "anywhere that is safe."

"It's complicated because we do not have an embassy in Ukraine and we have no authorities to ask for support," said Staif, whose country has been in crisis since insurgents tried to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in 2011.

'Traumatic experience'

With little government support, shuttered banks and empty cash machines, foreign nationals in Ukraine have come together to lend money and help each other out.

Afifa Maham, a medical student from Pakistan, said that 50 of them hired a private bus, each paying $50, to reach Shehyni, on the western border of Ukraine and Poland.

A journey that typically takes 2.5 hours took them 13 because of traffic jams and long queues at passport control.

"Short of 30 km, we saw a huge traffic jam. Our driver asked us to step out of the bus and walk to the border, carrying our heavy suitcases ... It was a traumatic experience," said Maham.

"When we reached the border, there was a massive crowd and there was lot of brawling and screaming. We were too scared to move further up to the gate," said Maham, who eventually entered Warsaw four days later with help of the Pakistani ambassador.

Ghassan Abdallah, 28, a Lebanese student at the Kharkiv National Medical University, said he spent $900 between trains, private cars and hotels to reach Romania. He then borrowed $1,300 from friends in Romania to fly home to Beirut.

Egyptian brothers and dentistry students Mohamed and Mahmoud Hossam also borrowed money from on friends in Kyiv - $680 to get bus tickets to the Polish border and then fly home to Cairo.

"If it were not for our friends here, we would not be able to make it," 22-year-old Mohamed said.

Dependent families

Getting out of Ukraine is only the first step.

Several Nigerian students who have made it to Poland and Hungary said they could not afford to go home - and the sacrifices their families made to send them to Ukraine meant they had to find a way to finish their degrees in Europe.

"My parents are farmers who grow cassava," Ehigiamusoe Godfrey, who was studying languages in Ukraine's eastern city of Dnipro with the hope of being able to support his parents after graduation.

"They sold everything to send me to study in Ukraine," Godfrey, 24, said by Whatsapp call from a church-funded hotel room in Lodz in central Poland, where he has food and accommodation for the next three days.

The Nigerian government plans to evacuate over 5,000 of its nationals from Poland, Hungary and Romania and on Thursday dispatched two planes to Warsaw.

"Some of us are waiting for the Nigerian government to arrange a flight, but we don't know when that will happen," said medical student Ogunnika Oluwanifemi who traveled by bus and train for four days from southeastern Ukraine to Hungary.

"Our parents back home took out loans to send us to Ukraine. How can we ask them (for money) when we know they are already in debt?" said Oluwanifemi, 20, whose parents run a small business in Nigeria's Ondo state.

Many are now dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Natalia Mufutau, who is Polish and married to a Nigerian, is mobilizing people in Poland to help stranded Africans.

"We are doing everything, from organizing buses to transport them and providing immigration information and translation at the border," Mufutau said by phone from the Finnish capital, Helsinki, where she lives.

"Some of their families can send them a little money, like about 25 euros ($28). But it's not enough for them to survive here so we are trying to raise funds so we can support them."

Meanwhile, Adebisi remains in his Sumy apartment with eight other Nigerian friends, hoping to eke out their funds until a safe evacuation strategy is in place.

"It is scary, we don't know what will happen in the next hour. We saw on social media that Africans have died trying to cross the border, from hypothermia and exhaustion," he said.

"We see photos of places we have visited in Ukraine now destroyed by bombs. This feeling is not something I would wish on anybody."

Winter is hitting the Gaza Strip and many of the nearly 2 million Palestinians displaced by the devastating 14-month war with Israel are struggling to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.

There is a shortage of blankets and warm clothing, little wood for fires, and the tents and patched-together tarps families are living in have grown increasingly threadbare after months of heavy use, according to aid workers and residents.

Shadia Aiyada, who was displaced from the southern city of Rafah to the coastal area of Muwasi, has only one blanket and a hot water bottle to keep her eight children from shivering inside their fragile tent.

“We get scared every time we learn from the weather forecast that rainy and windy days are coming up because our tents are lifted with the wind. We fear that strong windy weather would knock out our tents one day while we’re inside,” she said.

With nighttime temperatures that can drop into the 40s (the mid-to-high single digits Celsius), Aiyada fears that her kids will get sick without warm clothing.

When they fled their home, her children only had their summer clothes, she said. They have been forced to borrow some from relatives and friends to keep warm.

The United Nations warns of people living in precarious makeshift shelters that might not survive the winter. At least 945,000 people need winterization supplies, which have become prohibitively expensive in Gaza, the UN said in an update Tuesday. The UN also fears infectious disease, which spiked last winter, will climb again amid rising malnutrition.

The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, known as UNRWA, has been planning all year for winter in Gaza, but the aid it was able to get into the territory is “not even close to being enough for people,” said Louise Wateridge, an agency spokeswoman.

UNRWA distributed 6,000 tents over the past four weeks in northern Gaza but was unable to get them to other parts of the Strip, including areas where there has been fighting. About 22,000 tents have been stuck in Jordan and 600,000 blankets and 33 truckloads of mattresses have been sitting in Egypt since the summer because the agency doesn’t have Israeli approval or a safe route to bring them into Gaza and because it had to prioritize desperately needed food aid, Wateridge said.

Many of the mattresses and blankets have since been looted or destroyed by the weather and rodents, she said.

The International Rescue Committee is struggling to bring in children’s winter clothing because there “are a lot of approvals to get from relevant authorities,” said Dionne Wong, the organization’s deputy director of programs for the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The ability for Palestinians to prepare for winter is essentially very limited,” Wong said.

The Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating aid shipments into Gaza said in a statement that Israel has worked for months with international organizations to prepare Gaza for the winter, including facilitating the shipment of heaters, warm clothing, tents and blankets into the territory.

More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry's count doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has said more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war was sparked by Hamas’ October 2023 attack on southern Israel, where the armed group killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages in Gaza.

Negotiators say Israel and Hamas are inching toward a ceasefire deal, which would include a surge in aid into the territory.

For now, the winter clothing for sale in Gaza's markets is far too expensive for most people to afford, residents and aid workers said.

Reda Abu Zarada, 50, who was displaced from northern Gaza with her family, said the adults sleep with the children in their arms to keep them warm inside their tent.

“Rats walk on us at night because we don’t have doors and tents are torn. The blankets don’t keep us warm. We feel frost coming out from the ground. We wake up freezing in the morning,” she said. “I’m scared of waking up one day to find one of the children frozen to death.”

On Thursday night, she fought through knee pain exacerbated by cold weather to fry zucchini over a fire made of paper and cardboard scraps outside their tent. She hoped the small meal would warm the children before bed.

Omar Shabet, who is displaced from Gaza City and staying with his three children, feared that lighting a fire outside his tent would make his family a target for Israeli warplanes.

“We go inside our tents after sunset and don’t go out because it is very cold and it gets colder by midnight,” he said. “My 7-year-old daughter almost cries at night because of how cold she is.”

Foreign Students Fleeing Ukraine Battle Racism, Extortion