Nearly 1,700 of them would be blocked in this city located about fifty kilometers from Russia. They demand the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to allow their evacuation.
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A Soumy, in the north-east of Ukraine, Hope Maki, 21, lives in alert state. Tanzanian student in third year of medicine, it is trapped in the city, located about fifty kilometers from Russia. This important student city is one of the first Ukrainian localities have been bombarded since the beginning of the Russian offensive. “At night, I sleep little. Yesterday, I still heard a bombardment and I saw missiles by the window,” she says by phone, Sunday, March 6th.
Since the beginning of the war, Hope Maki is confined to a hotel of Soumy with dozens of other foreign students, Indians and Africans for the most part. Come to study the medicine, marketing or l ‘ Engineering , they would still be nearly 1,700 to be blocked in the city, according to the informal estimates circulating. “The roads and train station have been bombarded, we can not leave the city anymore,” says Hope Maki. The young woman is worried about food, which starts to miss, and intermittent cuts of electricity and drinking water. “We feel abandoned by the Ukrainian authorities. We survive thanks to the gifts of our classmates,” she says.
To alert on their fate, dozens of African students gathered on Saturday in front of the hotel. While more than 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of the war, they consider itself hostage in a conflict that does not “concern them”. “We want to go home! Let us leave!”, Have they chanted in a video broadcast live on Instagram by one of them. In turn, they took the floor to testify of their moral and psychological fatigue.
“This morning at 6 o’clock we were awakened by bombing. I counted six. What did we do wrong to be locked up at this hotel? We do not feel safe here we Are traumatized, we will never live again as before “, is running out a Nigerian, camera face.
Emergency number
Some explain to try to leave the city by taxi – with more than 2,000 euros, according to a student – but they claim to have been repressed by Ukrainian soldiers who would have asked them to leave at the hotel. The group of students becomes instrumentalized by the Ukrainian authorities. “From the bursting of the war, the University refused to provide us with buses to leave the city. I do not want to serve as a bait”, denounces in the video a young woman, alluding to the accusations carried by Moscow according to Which kiev would use civilians like human shield.
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